On negotiating the parallels and divergences of kinkphobia and homophobia

In the past couple of weeks, I've been feeling somewhat battered and bruised by LGB people (no trans* folks that I noticed) making assumptions about BDSM (which seems ironic, since as I understand the history, the idea of a BDSM community grew up out of the leather SM scene in gay communities).

There is a tendency, I think, among BDSM activists to want to see LGBT activism as automatically our allies, because we see that they have fought many of the same battles that we are going through or have gone through, and it is the easiest thing in the world to borrow a lot of the language and ideas that they used in their battles, to express our concerns about oppression of kinky folks. When people are familiar with how an idea or trope of the oppressors have affected LGBT folks, it seems easiest to say, "it's like that thing that gay people had/have".

There are lots of ways in which homophobia and kinkphobia are not comparable, so this isn't always a good thing in terms of negotiating alliances. We want to say, "look, we've got the same problem as you, let's work together", but sometimes what we hear back is, "yours is not an oppression, go away and stop stealing our stuff".

Equally, it is important to be aware that BDSMers can be just as heteronormative, and our spaces just as unsafe for gay folks, as any other space that isn't gay-only: not all kinky folks are good allies.

Back in mid-2009, Clarisse Thorn wrote an excellent post about BDSM as a sexual orientation, and complications of the orientation model. At the beginning of this month, a self-identified lesbian called Heather made the following comment:

I feel that calling S&M an orientation is taking the “sexual” word in “sexual orientation” too heavily – as though I’m a lesbian because I like tits. It gets so tiring to have my orientation reduced to that and it’s been decades and decades of attempting to convince those who have taken my rights away that it is not in fact all about sex.

For the S&M crowd to appropriate the term “sexual orientation” is to display an incomplete, arrogant, and frankly bigoted understanding of the term. People who are into S&M aren’t the only ones with innate preferences. Some lesbians prefer butch women and always have, some prefer tall women, some short, femme women, some androgynous women. We are all lesbians. As long as I can remember, I’ve been seriously turned on by lipstick and the idea of having it all over me. That is not my orientation. That is my taste. S&M is your taste. If you want to make it into a lifestyle, that’s your choice, but this is as ignorant as saying you’re of the “Catholic race” or the “submissive gender.” Frankly, your privilege is showing.

To which I replied:

Frankly, I think your vanilla privilege is showing. You sound very ignorant of the realities of BDSMers’ lives, feelings and realities.

You want to equate BDSM desires as equivalent to preferring a taller or shorter partner, and that is just flat-out WRONG in my experience of my sexual identity.

What, in your opinion, is the distinction between a “taste” and an “orientation”? Is it a difference in degree (that is, a “taste” is somehow less compelling than an “orientation”), or is it a difference in kind (if so, what is the basis for that difference)?

I identify as bi, with a strong preference for female partners over male. However, trumping that is my preference for a Submissive partner. If my partner is submitting and letting me do my sadism and bondage and Dominance on them then hir gender is really of much smaller concern to me. As noted above, I tend to prefer women as my partners but for me, that is closer to a “taste” for taller or shorter partners, than it is to an “orientation”.

You say, “It gets so tiring to have my orientation reduced to that and it’s been decades and decades of attempting to convince those who have taken my rights away that it is not in fact all about sex.” But now you are doing exactly the same thing to me: you are trying to reduce my orientation to “just sex”, and that is not acceptable to me. It is not true of me. Your vanilla privilege is showing.

I’ll be honest, I have doubts about the “orientation” model, but it comes the closest to describing how I feel and experience my sexuality as a sadist and a Dominant. I don’t know if it is prenatal or postnatal in its origins, I don’t know whether there is some life experience when I was young that turned me this way, or if I was born like it, or if it was just my weird destiny planned out by God above, for His/Her/Its/Their grand Purpose. It really doesn’t matter to me what the reason for it is. I am the way I am, and it is NOT a “taste” or a “preference”.

I've done some thinking about those questions about my orientations, and I'll probably sit right down and write a new post immediately after this one to talk about that (I composed both posts before posting, and that one actually precedes this one, so I can put the link in here). For now though, I just want to point out the word "appropriating" used in Heather's comment, and the feeling I felt of being rendered invisible or dismissed by her, that I responded to.

Also at Clarisse Thorn's, on a post about "submissive skills", a commenter dropped a link and asked for people's thoughts.

It described someone who had used BDSM as a response to the aftermath of sexual abuse, and who had felt damaged by that use (and by the ways in which some other BDSMers described their successful use of BDSM to deal with those things - such that she characterised their life stories as "propaganda"). This person had used a technique the description of which culminated in:

Once I separated the fantasy from the feeling, I’d consciously impose other powerful images on that feeling – like seeing a waterfall. If they can put SM on you, you can put waterfalls there instead. I reprogrammed myself. Instead of having to say “I’ll do anything you want,” I would see a waterfall and have the same intensity of feeling.

And you know what? I'm happy that that worked for the person in question and that she felt healed by doing it. But (apart from the implication, that the author has now denied intending, that BDSM is a symptom of being abused as a child), this still felt very bad.

I dimly recalled someone writing about this issue elsewhere, and it turns out that it seems to have been in response to the same story (albeit quoted in an entirely different blog), and her personal response to being given a similar narrative as that presented by the woman quoted above. She wrote:

I spent so much time worrying about my sexuality not changing, of waterfalls or whatever else not replacing my self, that I didn't allow myself for years to take pride in the actual progress I was making toward healing. I became obsessed with the idea that my sexuality wasn't changing and therefore there was something wrong with me, even as I slowly felt better about myself, less inclined to self-harming (again, maybe to you the desire to do SM and to self-harm are the same, but in my experience they are very different), etc.

She added:

In a nutshell, that's my major problem with both reparative therapy and anti-SM "radical feminism": this theory that you're broken, and if you just pray enough or "examine your desires" enough you'll heal, but that if you don't you must just be too hurt, too broken, too weak, or too easily seduced to get over it.

I made a similar response to the commenter at Clarisse's blog, based on my vague recollection of the above example, using the term "pray away the gay" to refer to reparative therapy and similar approaches.

At an entirely different blog and thread, a gay rights activist took exception to someone else drawing parallels between "pray the gay away" and the thought stream in some therapists' approaches and in a lot of feminism, that by purifying oneself (of trauma, or of Patriarchal thoughts or whatever) one can "cure" oneself of BDSMness. Again, this was characterised as appropriation. In turn, I felt the language with which he expressed his objection was dismissive and saying that kinky folks don't suffer as a result of this type of thinking. (In the future, I will use the term "will yourself normative" to refer to the general type of thinking instead of drawing the analogy; it should also be noted that the person who originally used the analogy has apologised for that usage).

"Will Yourself Normative" is something that I think underpins a lot of sexual oppression, and it finds different modes of expression depending on which angle it's targeting; homophobia has strong roots in religious institutions, and there are lots of organisations that either tackle it, or embody it. Kinkphobia is often more tacit, and is more likely to be found institutionalised in law and in mental health (although that is, thankfully, changing, there are such provisions in things like the "Dangerous Pictures Act", requiring people learn not to have evil thoughts after having looked at "extreme pornography"). And, of course, there are the political attitudes exemplified by (but not, I think, unique to) the radical feminist ideology discussed in the earlier quotation and linked post. Those remarks are based on reading I've done and (with respect to kinkphobia) lived experience. I hesitate to talk about WYN in respect to transphobia, and I don't think I've seen it discussed, but I would imagine something similar does exist.

I'm trying to think what the point of all this is. It probably comes down to this: that it is important, when drawing parallels, to be aware of the ways in which things are not similar as well as they ways in which they are, and to be sensitive to the particular meaning and significance of others' terms. Equally, it's a plea for others not to take the tools of the oppression that they have suffered from, and turn them on others.