Forced masculinity as humiliation/submission: a missing fetish?

I had been pondering a post about this topic for a couple of weeks, and the topic came up on the Informed Consent BDSM community website discussion boards (you might need to be a member to read it there):

Masculinerised subs?

I know that some male subs seem to like the idea of being feminised and depending on your views, this may make them seem more submissive for the Dom/Domme.

However, is there a female equivalent? i.e. making a femal sub more masculine and would this have a similar effect or the reverse?

Rather than write my own post, I'm just going to post here what I wrote over there (with a little extra feminist analysis in the first paragraph) and ask people for their thoughts, suggestions, analysis and views to be posted in comments.

***

It's one of the things that really bothers me about the way crossdressing as a sub tends to be portrayed: it's as though people think it is inherently humiliating to be viewed as more feminine. Needless to say, that's a hugely sexist way of thinking and it disgusts me (it also keeps me from exploring me feminine-submissive interests, because I really really do not do humiliation from the bottom - it's a hard-limit). So I want there to be an inverse form. If not in actual usage, then at least in concept, so it can actually be used to unpick the knots of Patriarchy. It really is a problem that the worst insults to use to a man are to liken him to something female.

One thought is the inverse of sissification being "slobbification" - enforced dressing down completely and sitting in slouchy poses and such. Not sure what the sexual thrill would be for the top in that, but who knows - there's probably someone out there for whom it would be a turn on.

Another thought is to focus on other experiences of masculinity - having to knuckle under to an ungrateful and uncaring boss to keep a boring and laborious job you don't really want anyway but you've got to pay the bills: I can see that as a roleplay option.

Other "lifestyle" options might be recreating master/servant roles as a mirror of feminised "maids": you could have "masculinerised" farmhand/serving staff/mechanic/etc roles with the whole forelock-tugging routine and so on, with grubby overalls or butlering outfits and so on: think class as well as gender as a mimicked axis of oppression to produce the power-exchange and/or humiliation aspects.

***

It's worth noting that several commenters on that thread said they thought that masculinising someone would surely be to put them in a more Dominant, powerful role - you can see above how I thought that ties into class assumptions of male roles as well, imagining that masculinising must mean either uniformed services or wearing a smart suit symbolising a powerful social position.

One thing I forgot to mention in that first comment (I've now copy-pasted this section into a new comment over there!) is that masculinisation of the type discussed above would also involve on some level making the target of the fetish feel de-sexualised: there are plenty of porn images of women doing traditionally male working-class roles but dressed in skimpy outfits and flashing their bits at the camera. That's not a masculinising fetish. Masculinisation would involve stripping away the sexual and sexualising content (at least, for the bottom) and involve some element of sexual denial fetish as well (which is quite a common kink for both men and women as bottoms). One version might involve using some kind of slow vibrating toy to maintain a certain level of arousal in the masculinised woman throughout, but no opportunity to explore it.

Hmm. I now have a fantasy of a sex toy designed like a feeldoe but with a floppy external "penis" to mimic what a man has when he's not aroused, and the wearer has inserted a stiffer dong that shifts and rubs as the external thing wobbles and shifts in her pants through walking and working, to create a frustrating sense of arousal and awareness of her dick.

Pick-up and transgressing the barriers between us - the vast social barriers!

After the prolonged hiatus in my attempts to figure out how to start talking to women out there in meatspace, I decided this week to get back to the most basic step of all - saying "hello".

Specifically, saying hello to someone I don't know. Even more specifically, saying hello to someone I don't know but I might like to get to know better, because she's female, attractive appearance, in my age range and much more than that you can't tell just from looking.

Saying "hello" doesn't sound hard, right? Although given that my typical performance hasn't been good, maybe that's too optimistic. But the thing is, what I tend to struggle with is what to say after saying "hello" - the thing that explains why "hello" in the first place.

So, the plan was this: say hello to an attractive woman walking the other way, as we pass on the pavement, and just keep going, no looking back. No "what to say next" need come into the equation, and no need to worry about what I'm going to say to start things off (I actually decided to say, "Evenin'" as in, "Good evening") either. One word. How hard could that be?

The more astute amongst my readership may have guessed that there wouldn't be much of a story if it was easy. And indeed, it was a lot harder than I imagined.

Here's what happened: I espied the woman to whom I would say "Evenin'" with plenty of time to recognise that this was the opportunity for which I had been preparing. It was evening, and so dark, but plenty of street lighting and other people milling around. Zero worries.

And yet - I still felt a tight knot start to grip in my stomach, and anxiety start to rise. What the heck was going on, what on Earth could cause such a reaction in this zero-pressure situation?

Then I remembered my parents talking about how when they moved from Yorkshire to the South East, how they were struck by how nobody said "'ow do" down here. "Up Home," as Papa calls it, it was commonplace for random people to greet each other in passing. In these parts, not so much. And I grew up round here. So there was a social barrier because it is not "the done thing".

So I resolved to be more like Papa, and play by those rules.

All in the space of a second or two. So, I did say, "Evenin'!" to the attractive woman walking the other way. And, lo and behold, she said "Evening!" back (what else would she do?) I had successfully crossed that barrier, transgressed it, if you will, and had not been struck down by lightning or anything else for that matter. This is what the advice I have been reading on pick-up seems to emphasise and start with: whatever you're imagining as the awful consequence of saying something, it's highly unlikely to be as bad as you think, and in fact most often will be quite pleasant (such as, exchanging a wish of a good evening in the street with a passer-by). The idea that I took on board back in the summer was that you want to build up as many of this pleasant little experiences as possible to boost the confidence levels and then once you get comfortable with "hello", you can start to think about the next step. I struggled to get going with that in the summer, but who knows, maybe 2012 will see a change in that?

One other thing that occurred to me as I walked away from the encounter was that I am also definitely an introvert; I like to live in my head a lot and don't like intrusions that much; I find company exhausting (even when I'm enjoying it). So it's entirely possible that another source of the anxiety and reluctance to make even that small move was that my nature creates stronger barriers for me in that sense, and so for my introverted brain it was a bigger transgression than for a more extroverted person. If so, then I guess if I want to have success with meeting women, I need to get used to making that step, because the feeling won't go away.

The things for which they'll respect you

Sharideth @ A Woman's Guide To Women: A Blog For Men has a post called "How To Be An Alpha Male: Part 2" that raised an interesting question or concept, which will be the main point of this post. First, though, I want to clarify that I extremely dislike the language of "alpha male/beta male" because I think a) it's a distraction from living life well, and b) it's the language of competition rather than communication, and it's the language of commodity value rather than human connection. A third reason would be that they inevitably point to a type of performative masculinity that I have rejected. I loathe the terms and rebel against them and what they stand for - and, like the crew of Serenity, I aim to misbehave.

I attempted to articulate some of my specific rejections, and why I don't see them as counting against me (in particular, the distinction I drew between providing security for a partner or being secure for a partner seemed to get lost, I'd be interested to know if my readers can see what I'm getting at with that one). That did not go so well, and last night I lost my temper a little (one woman assuming I'd be interested in her with her kinkphobic attitude while at the same time wanting me to be a mindreader to make decisions for her without canvassing her thoughts... but I digress). To illustrate this distinction, Sharideth said, "got a girl on the line? go fix something that’s broken at her place without being asked." I said, "the type of woman I want to date will either ask me to fix that broken thing at her place, or will get angry at me for doing it for her when she had plans to do it herself next weekend. If she didn’t get angry at me for doing it without her asking, then I would start to lose interest in her." Of course, it's possible to ask in an oblique fashion (e.g. "I have this broken thing and it's really bugging me, I wish I knew someone who could fix it" type of thing)! And yes, it is kind of nice to have the opportunity to be all, "Here I am to save the day!" every once in a while. But I'm not going to make it my business to save the day, that's too much like an unequal partnership. But once again, I am digressing.

The title of this post is, "The things for which they'll respect you." "Respect" is one of the things that Sharideth says marks out an "alpha male" from all those other Greek letters (no one ever talks about an omicron male or a nu male, do they?) Specifically, she says:

your perceived value goes way up when it’s obvious other people respect you. easy way to gain respect? be respectable. duh. there are million different things people can be respected for. it can also vary depending which circles you run in and the value system of each group. Craig is a good example. in music circles, he’s the man when it comes to engineering. with our Christian friends, he’s the go-to theology guy. at a bar, he’s the one to beat at pool and compare beards with. but he consciously does something that a lot of men don’t. he decides what’s important to him and gets good at it. there is no half way with my boy. his pursuits might be few, but he actively makes the most of them. that’s respectable.

The point that sprang out at me was, "he decides what’s important to him and gets good at it." Now, I could take issue on the grounds that it's not always possible to get good at something, no matter how important it is to you - biology and genetics being what they are[1]. (There's also the issue that with some types of thing, that can actually lead to problems, for example, deciding that "staying/getting thin" is important and "getting good" at it can lead to anorexia nervosa or similar problems.) I want to leave those quibbles to one side and think about the underlying idea in the statement, which I think can be characterised as "dedication". As Roy Castle sang, "Dedication's what you need, if you want to be a record breaker!" Not everyone with dedication will get to break records, but you're rarely going to break a record incidentally or accidentally (Basic Instructions notwithstanding).

I think it is true that, in general, people respect those who work at something, and dedicate their efforts to developing some skill or talent. They may not think much of the choice (for example, I don't see pool as being a particularly worthy thing to which one might dedicate oneself), but they tend to respect that achieving expertise takes a certain approach.

And, if you get good at something and people have some connection to that something, then they will look to you for answers (or at least, suggestions) in circles where those things are important, just as Sharideth described.

Now, I have had a problem with choosing what to get good at (or to attempt to get good at). For a large proportion of my life, I was told I could be anything, and couldn't choose between the various options until (arguably) it was too late. That's not very respectable (and, in writing a song about it, I broke one of Sheila Davis' rules of good lyric writing, which is always make your central character someone people will respect - but I also wrote a song inspired by the fact that at various times some of my favourite lyrics broke all the rules that Davis gives, so that shows you how closely I follow that advice!)

That said, I decided to sit down and look at my life and my choices as they are now, and see what are the things that I focus on, that I find important, that I aim to be good at, and for which people might respect me and my accomplishments?

The first thing that springs to mind is my music. Although I am not a hugely talented musician on any of my instruments, I have nevertheless worked and practised to get to the levels I have reached. I have dedicated myself to figuring out how to make nice noises and being able to express myself through guitar, ukulele, mandolin and double bass. I treat the tin whistle, recorder and harmonica as hobby instruments, but I still make the effort to know enough that I can play reasonably well on them. It seems odd that this should be the case, because when I started learning them I never really saw it as something more than a hobby, but now it's an important part of my life and what I do. I doubt I will ever be the person other musicians turn to for advice, but when it comes to social music, being able to do more than just join in is appreciated, and people ask me to perform for them (and I still tell the story about earning a pint, and a train fare, by busking at a pub having returned from the Fame Academy auditions). I still hope to have that dedication pay off, maybe with success at the X Factor in 2012, if they make a series this year.

Along with the skills to be able to play reasonably well on my instruments, I dedicate myself to writing music and songs (as noted above, I've read a lot about the craft of lyric writing, even if I don't always care to follow the guidelines!) For this, I definitely am respected by others. The highlight so far being that I was chosen to compose a piece of music especially for the bridal entrance at my sister's wedding, based on some of the other instrumental work I've done. I would like to have more time free to focus on songwriting, and in particular on finishing some of the fragments that I have jotted down. But even if I did have more time, and finished those ones, then in between finishing them I would make more idea-fragments, and wish for still more time to complete those...

Writing in general is something that I pay a lot of attention to. I may seem to bash out these posts in a quick half hour or hour at the keyboard, allowing my mind to wander where it will (see above re: "I digress" more than once), but I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to say and how I intend to say it. Sometimes I'm still not happy with the result after I hit "publish", but if I'm truly not satisfied then I delete the post without publishing. More generally, I write a lot of fiction (of which you can see my ongoing saga "Cyborg Sleeps", presented in raw, first-draft format, on this blog) and spend a lot of time and effort on crafting where I want my stories to go, how best to develop things and so on. Even on Cyborg Sleeps, I put this work in, despite the fact that I view it almost as a throwaway thing that I'm doing for fun and not putting in the proper redrafting work for it before sharing. I take pride in what I do with my writing, and I hope it shows. As I mentioned at the start of the year, I am now putting serious effort into finishing the first, "discovery" draft of my novel. I think, because most of the stories that people see that I write are presented as the throwaway 1st draft format, maybe people don't respect me for this as much as I would wish, but my belief is that when the hidden work is completed on the stuff that I really care about (like the novel) then maybe that will change.

Then there's my BDSM. I take the duties of a top pretty seriously, and there are skills and abilities that take dedication to learn. While risk is a present factor in any BDSM, as the top particularly, it's my duty to keep the risks to an acceptable level, by minimising them without disrupting the play. I may never have all the skills and competencies of some other tops with more experience and more access to learning resources than me, but I make sure that when I do something, I know what I'm doing with it. I think I do better at the mental aspects (understanding, communication and so on), because in general as well as in BDSM I have put a lot of effort into becoming better at these.

In a work setting, or rather, on those occasions when I've had work, and in the meantime in my mindset in what I want to do with work, I am dedicated to customer service, in being as helpful as I can to the customer to help them find exactly what they need to fit their criteria. I am not so dedicated to sales, so I won't try to sell something extra that might be nice but isn't actually on their shopping list (I might not even recognise the opportunity to do that). I'm about helping, not selling, and if that is a reason I am still out of work, then so be it. My admin roles also, I bring that same thing of helping others to my identity: I want things filed properly so the next person who needs it can find it; I want the forms done properly so that people who need the info can read it easily; and so on. Keeping things moving smoothly is about making life easier for those around me in that sort of role, and that's what I dedicate myself to. When I have had the chance to demonstrate these, I do believe I have earned respect for it.

So, dear reader, what about you?

What are the things to which you dedicate yourself, and for which you believe you win respect?



[1] Although I would say also that if it's important to you, then biology and genetics are no reason for you not to do all you can to get as good as you can at it, even if "as good as you can" is still rubbish (eg Don Quixote and "To Dream The Impossible Dream" etc)

Feeling like you're failing when you're not: political blogger edition

I was all geared up to write a blog post about how I had ended up writing a dating blog (by someone who hardly ever goes on dates!) and how this was originally intended to be all political and gender activism and stuff and now look at me...

So, I decided to get some figures to back up my argument. I decided to have a look at how few posts focussing on politics I had written in the past year and then do that whole "woe is me" thing.

Thing is, it didn't quite work out that way. In the past year or so, I wrote about 200 posts; in the same time, there were 23 posts labelled with the "politics" tag, although one of those was an episode of Cyborg Sleeps, so probably not about real world politics as such. That's roughly 1 in every 9 posts was labelled "politics". The thing is, a lot of posts that aren't to do with protests, campaigns or electoral politics, still relate to gender and sexual politics through the whole gender and sex thing - about which I write fairly frequently and a fair amount of that writing makes some form of political point or other relating to those topics. So in fact, it might be 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 posts. By comparison, there were 40 posts tagged "dating" (and generally, even tangentially related topics got a "dating" tag), which is exactly 1 in 5. So the best guess is that I've been posting about equally about the originally-intended topics for this blog, and about the more personal feelings I have about the world of dating (and it's possible that there is some overlap). It does rather leave the question of what the other 3/5 of my posts in the last 12 months were about, but frankly, that's not the point. The point is, in my mind I had the idea that my dating posts heavily outnumbered my politics and gender related posts, and at worst it's only a ratio of 2:1, and a fairer guess might be that they're evenly matched. So, why the big difference between perceptions and reality?

As mentioned, I started this blog to talk about sexual and gender politics, with a particular interest in kink, trans* issues and feminism. A few months after I started it in 2007 (it feels weird to think I've been doing this for nearly 5 years now!) I entered severe episode of depression and made the decision to use this space to talk about those personal issues as well, and the blog has more-or-less had that shape ever since, with the balance between political and personal shifting according to the shape of what's going on politically, and what's going on for me - my number of available "spoons" also dictating to a certain extent which topics I took on at which times. But in the back of my mind there has always been that feeling that this is "supposed" to be a political blog.

Since May this year, I have been exploring in a somewhat cack-handed way the world of dating, "pick-up artistry", and so on, seeking some kind of structure and principles that gel well with my personality and my political convictions re: feminism, gender equality and all that stuff. And, of course, being kinky an' all. Naturally, that exploration has been recorded regularly on this site.

So, each "dating" post seemed like it wasn't what this blog is "supposed" to be about, and sticks in my mind as an aberration; but each political post has seemed like a normal (and therefore less significant) event. So, I remember all the dating posts and ignore or forget all the political ones (I honestly thought in the past 6 months I'd only done about 5, and it's at least twice that). So I feel like I'm "failing", because I'm doing stuff I shouldn't, instead of stuff I should.

Which is, of course, baloney - not only is it perfectly okay to be writing about the dating issues (if only because, hello, gender and sex issues?!) - but also, I have been writing a reasonable amount about politics, too. It is true that my dating posts in total over 4.5 years numbered 113 to date, of which 40 came in the last 12 month, leaving 73 in the previous 3.5 years, but when you work it out, that's actually still roughly 1/3 of the posts in the previous 2/9 of the lifetime of the blog, which isn't that far off! On politics, there is more of an imbalance: it's closer to 1/8 in the past 2/9 of the blog's lifetime. However, when you run the numbers through a calculator, it turns out that on average I've been posting 3.3 posts per month on politics in the last year, whereas on average across the previous 3.5 years, I have been posting roughly 3.1 "politics" posts per month - in other words, the difference is about one post every month. Since I'm blogging about 16 times a month in total, that's not a big difference!

It's very easy to trick yourself into thinking you're doing more (or less) than you really are. I have felt a certain amount of downturn in my political blogging since the end of 2010: the all-out assault on the poor and vulnerable by the coalition government just beat the fight out of me (I ran out of spoons to keep up the struggle). But really, I have not been as lax as that made me feel. I have not been failing, I have just been expecting to fail, and I have been selectively remembering things in a way that matches that expectation. Checking the figures as I have done here, is a really good wake-up call. This is why I like SMART targets for my New Year's Resolutions, for example.

In the Tao of Pooh, there's a line about asking yourself, when you say, "I never get anything right" or similar things, "Is that true - or even possible?" This post is about asking, "Is that true?" when you think you're failing.

Frustrations of online dating: part picky

There are times when I will read a woman's profile (usually a woman's, anyway) and somehow feel that it's just not right. And the thing is, I have a hard time deciding to act on that feeling of not-right-ness and to click the "back" button without sending a message.

What I'm talking about is those situations when there are no clear "red flags", no "deal breakers", not even obvious "turn-offs". There may even be some of the "would be nice" features listed in that post. And yet, somehow it's just not right.

And it seems slightly churlish of me to say, "You tick the right boxes, and yet the answer's still no", especially when my field of dating interest in not that wide to begin with. (For clarification, I'm not saying that to her in an email/memo, but mentally saying it to the inanimate profile that she's put up on my screen through the dating site search engine.)

Now, I am sure PUA types would characterise that as "beta" type thinking, and I guess it is. The unstated premise is that I should be grateful for anything I can get, because supply is limited, I'm not that hot that I can just pick and choose, and all that kind of thing. That's definitely a valid angle to take, but the antithesis of those ideas ("I'm hot, and have plenty of opportunity to pick and choose") isn't really all the helpful as far as I can see, except perhaps for people who need that explicit confidence boost just to get started. Ultimately, though, that attitude to me still seems to be focussed on what others think of you, and on a marketplace mindset that (to me, anyway) seems harmful and takes away from the actual value in having a relationship.

Instead, I approach it from the perspective of what I hope to gain. Not how others see me, but how it feels. I want to be in a relationship, but in particular, I want to be in a relationship with someone whose company will make me happy, whose spirit seems to resonate well with mine - and when they're discordant, we have the foundation to resolve that or get through it. Basically, if I get the feeling from a profile that there's something discordant from the beginning - that is, that happiness is not likely with this person - then it's not going to be worthwhile contacting her, even if, "on paper", she looks like a good match.

It's often hard to pin down exactly what seems discordant in a profile, although I guess it's often some sense I get of implied divergent values or life expectations. Maybe something about he personality just seems like we'd rub each other up the wrong way (do your own double entendres there...) or something. But the point is, I have to keep in mind that the point of this is to find someone who will make me happier, and not someone who will only cause more grief. Reminding myself of this reminds me that it isn't churlish of me to choose not to contact these profiles, and ultimately, those deal-breakers/turn-offs/would be nice/must -haves aren't a neat shopping list or algorithm for finding a partner, such that all women who meet those criteria are eligible. They're the parameters for the search area is all, and in that search area there are still other, intangible, factors to take into account (some of which, I listed above).

And this is also what I have to remind myself of when I reply to women's profiles: just because I seem to tick all the boxes that they put on their description of "the man I'm looking for", it doesn't mean that the intangibles are going to work out for her.