Meatstick, please, with a side of masculine submission. Or.. let’s see what’s behind curtain #3.

In a somewhat recent post  that I’ve mentioned before Dev said, “In my ideal world (which may or may not be possible at all), set gender roles would not exist.  People would not view women and men differently on the basis of sex.  Things like femininity and masculinity would be for play, for hotness, and many people would have no need of them.  It would be the same way with power dynamics - nobody would be presumed to be stronger or better than anyone else, and people would only use power dynamics for play, like we do in bdsm.”

I heartily concur, and she said it much better than I would have had I tried.  Which made me realize that I really haven’t written much here about my views on gender.  Maybe because it’s so fucking complicated.  Most people like to think that’s not true, but it is.  When you start talking about gender and trying to define and neatly box things, you get into a mire pretty quick.  Because most of it is bullshit.

If someone were to ask, I’d like to say that gender is just a construct, just an idea, just a made-up way of categorizing people, because people seem to need to put things in tidy little pigeonholes.  But I don’t necessarily think that’s completely true.  It’s the whole nature vs. nurture debate, which can never be satisfactorily summed up. 

I hate thinking of gender as binary.  I know it isn’t for me.  And it isn’t for a lot of people.  But it is so incredibly hard to get out of that mode of thinking, it is so deeply ingrained into society, and into language.  And it is rather comforting, or at least easy, to have those tidy little categories.  Labels make things easier for the mind to grasp.  Or something.

MJ teases me because I have a “type.”  A type of guy I tend to be attracted to.  A pretty specific type. *sigh*  Ok, very specific.  Tall, slender, adorably geeky, submissive guys.  Throw a pair of glasses on him, and a button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and I’m salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs.  But why?  And how can I even begin to justify that when I’m so rabidly anti-binary-gender in general?  Because tall, slender, adorably geeky, submissive girls just don’t give me the same reaction.  Which is sort of funny to say because that’s a spot-on description of my girlfriend.  Is is genitalia?  Assumptions of personality based on gendered expectations?  I don’t know. 

Vaginas and labia and that sort of miscellany don’t really do much for me.  Just not exciting, generally.  If I had protruding bits that could fit into vaginas, I might feel differently about it.  I dunno, I do find female and feminine people attractive, and would happily have sex with any number of women.  It’s just that the usually-associated genitalia aren’t part of the excitement.  

But I do get excited about cock. 

*sigh* Maybe I shouldn’t spend so much time dissecting differences, maybe that’s my problem.  I tend to think in extremes.  What about intersexed people?  Women with big clits, men with small penises, transgendered folk of all flavors?  Makes it harder to talk about things when you throw away the categories, labels, little boxes.. 

I do know that for me, good sex usually doesn’t involve a single thought about gender.  It’s just me and my partner enjoying each other.  I don’t find myself feeling particularly feminine, or masculine, generally.  I do lust after a partner’s sensitive body part to fit into my sensitive body parts, but that’s biology and has nothing to do with “male” or “female.” 

I don’t know, I’ve been in a lot of discussions about gender, where some people want to break down all barriers, remove all binary vocabulary, get rid of the whole idea of gender.  And there’s always someone who says, hey, what the hell is wrong with having preferences?  So what if I like a big fat meatstick and don’t care to look at a wet flesh-hole?  And of course everyone is attracted to different things and sometimes those things end up being gender-specific, and of course when your husband transitions to living as a woman you shouldn’t be expected to still be as attracted to her.

MJ and I have had a lot of conversations about gender and one subject that keeps cropping up is types of people we’re attracted to.  For me it boils down to a strong attraction to the aforementioned specific type of guy, and a milder but infinitely more diverse attraction to genderqueer and female people.  I like slender guys - a lot.  And some cute chubby ones.  All submissive, pleasethanks.  And that’s pretty much it for the traditional male.  When it comes to women and genderqueer people, my attractions run the gamut from thick to thin, from innocent to tough, from dominant to submissive, from feminine to masculine and everything in between.

Meh, it’s easy to analyze things in the abstract.  Everything changes once interaction is out of the theoretical and into the flesh.  There’s just a click with some people that has nothing to do with what you’d see in a photograph.  And sometimes there’s no click at all once a photogenic person is there face to face.

Ah fuck, it’s late and I lost whatever point I may have started out with.  Just read that first bolded paragraph that Dev wrote.

 

 

 

Dev’s post on female submission

As MJ is downstairs playing Rock Band and being very distracting right now, I can’t really write a decent post, but there are some excellent things being said here about female submission and how people’s ideas of it are influenced by feminism and their views on the patriarchy.

 

playing. dress up.

[This was written as a comment on one of devastatingyet's posts, but I want to put it here too, because it's something I have strong feelings about but haven't actually posted yet.]

I feel totally awkward when I try to dress up for bdsm, especially playing at home. I’ve been trying to explain to my play partner how all the “sexy dominatrix” paraphernalia makes me feel but he doesn’t seem to get it. I’ll have to show him this blog post.

The most sterotypically femininely sexy thing I’ve felt comfortable sceneing in was a red cotton skirt with a black tank top. And bare feet. (It is so much more physically and mentally comfortable to scene in bare feet.)

I am all about the cargo shorts and tank tops in the summer.

I think it comes down to power. I want to feel powerful when I scene, in fact that’s why I do this stuff. Wearing uncomfortable, expensive, restrictive clothes that are so blatantly made to conform to beauty standards that piss me off… yeah, no feeling of power in that. Wearing clothes I’m comfortable in, that I can move in, that reflect *my* ideas of attractiveness, clothes that I can forget about while I’m doing all the stuff that *does* make me feel powerful… that feels good.

 

femininity = submission? fuck that. and fuck me, while you’re at it.

A well-phrased excerpt from BJ (emphases mine):

“One crucial thing was over looked in this race to elevate women to bossiness. To escape the oppressive tyranny of PIV sex and let women be in charge. They failed to notice that it wasn’t being penetrated itself that was submissive. It was just that all femininity was equated with submission - that everything a woman did in sex had been made to look as if it was a priori submissive.

But there is no way that such simple basics – being the hole or the plug – are on their own submissive or dominant. It only has further meaning in context.

Sometimes it feels like femdom is a big mirror. You hold it up to the world and you see all kinds of yukky beliefs reflected by and clear. Like that bit in the Snow Queen or something.
But that’s the fact. Way back in the past when they invented misogyny they decided that women were lower status and thus had the low status role in sex. He had the mighty phallus – she had the dirty needy hole. You can see how femdom later thought, hey, lets flip this shit. Let’s make the guy be called slut for wanting and be filled. But those things aren’t really submissive. Having something pushed into your body that feels amazing is only submissive because someone decided that the female role in sex was a submissive one.

You don’t need to put the guy on the bottom because he is the bottom. It misses the fucking point. Fucking. Which is the point. Which feels good. Which doesn’t have an innate power exchange embedded in it.

Really. It just doesn’t.”

 

Is fat a feminist issue?

While pondering possible topics for my own blog posts, I came across this discussion about fat being a feminist issue. I’m sure I have something to say about it, but my brain feels a little fried at the moment.

And here’s another blogger’s response to it - even if you don’t read the original discussion, read this. (I haven’t read the rest of her blog, but I love her a little bit already.)