Freedom & Autonomy part 2: the feminist sadist

In Part 1 I answered the questions, "Are there any particular stories you want to tell about gaining (or losing) your own sexual freedom or autonomy?" and "What does 'sexual autonomy' mean to you? What does 'sexual freedom' mean to you?"

However, in the call for submissions for the 15th Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy, two other questions were posed, and I would feel my work was incomplete until I had addressed those also.

They were:

How does your knowledge of feminism play into the concepts of sexual freedom and autonomy?

How does your sexual autonomy or freedom conflict, interact, or engage with your feminist beliefs?

To answer the first question is relatively simple, because in my thinking, sexual freedom and autonomy are natural results from the core principles that seem to characterise feminism. As explained in Part 1, I feel that "ownership" is a more appropriate term than "autonomy", since sexuality is often not an informed or unencumbered choice; instead, it is something innate within us. For that reason I shall substitute "ownership" (meaning, if you will, "self-ownership") where others might put "autonomy". Effectively, this self-ownership is the practical definition of "autonomy" when it comes to sexuality.

For women to be free (and the social equals of men), this freedom obviously must encompass all aspects of their lives. But if men do not own their own sexuality and thus experience sexual freedom of their own, this is impossible. As long as the meme persists of men as the rampaging, uncontrolled sexual beasts, then women must always fear sexuality on some level; and there will always be some men who choose to live down to the conception of themselves.

The question, "How does your sexual autonomy or freedom conflict, interact, or engage with your feminist beliefs?" is more tricky to answer directly. The shortest answer I can give is that until I had a much better understanding of feminism, I did not have sexual freedom and ownership.

I am a sadist and sexual Dominant, and someone who (as far as I can tell) is "orientationally" that way - i.e. "born" to be a sadist, the same way that many homosexuals are seemingly born to be that way (either through prenatal conditions in the womb, or genetics, or other factors). I am also largely heterosexual, which means that sexual sadism and Dominance tend to be directed towards hurting and controlling a woman. Yet I was brought up in a family with links to the feminist and Left movements of the 1970s and 1980s, and some of those values were certainly passed down to us kids in the family. It was also regularly taught in school, from a more patriarchal standpoint, "you never hit a lady". That's some serious conflict there! There was also all around me during my teens, media representations of sadism as unequivocally bad: the images of sexual sadists were only of psychopathic serial killers who had to be hunted down by the police. As a teen, I thought I was inevitably destined to be one of those serial killers, and I really didn't want to be.

What perhaps prevented me from becoming such a criminal is that I discovered the world of consensual BDSM, and with it more nuanced and in-depth theories of consent and of sexuality in general. This in turn tied in to my pre-existing feminist inclinations, which is how my own understanding of sexual freedom and ownership started to develop. Only with that understanding could I start to claim my own sexual freedom and own my own sexuality. Furthermore, the more I learned (and continue to learn) about feminism, the stronger my understanding became, and the more assured I was of my own sexual freedom.

I want to close these thoughts, including those in Part 1, with a slogan from a series of teen sci-fi novels: Time Rope by Robert Leeson

The basic overall plot was that scientists had created a way to travel through time to experience episodes in your past lives, and interact with the past world. The slogan of the scientific project was:

"Know your past. Understand your present. Choose your future."

In this, I feel the definition of what it is to have personal (and therefore, sexual) freedom and autonomy is captured. While to some extent, it is impossible to know what makes us have the sexuality we do, we do know what our lives have been since then, and we can certainly understand better from knowing that, how we fit into the world. And, in understanding that, we are better able to choose our own path, and not simply follow what is laid out for us.