You may have recently heard about South Korean womens’ 4B movement. Loosely translated (different culture, different nuances), it means swearing off men. Kind of like the trend we picked up from the height of Sex And The City but thoughtful, organized, and documented. The 4B’s (“no”s) are: no sex with men, no giving birth, no dating men, and no marriage with men. (You can read more about the events that led to this movement in South Korea, most of which are very known to American women as well.) Within days after the pundits declared Trump president, “4B” appeared in my social media feeds, amidst my woman friends showing off their fresh anti-patriarchy mullet haircuts and feminist laptop stickers. In the Trump era, like with the 4Bs, there is a pervasive mood that many men no longer deserve the pleasure women give them.* Men have clearly demonstrated that (as the proverbial meme language says) it’s not ok to be a racist rapist, but it’s not a dealbreaker either.
With this “fuck off if you self-define by a dick” mood out and proud in current media, it’s a weird time for women submissives. In particular, it’s a weird time for those, like me, who want men to be in charge of them.
As a submissive with two Doms and a titularly fantastic pitch about it for Glamour UK (forthcoming), I got myself invited to Halina Rejin’s Babygirl preview at the Crosby St. Hotel in Manhattan, which occurred less than a week after Trump was elected. Despite being completely on board with Nicole Kidman’s character, Romy, and her desire to sexually submit to a man, I acknowledge that some moments of the film may be extra cringe on the spiky heels of Trump’s push to the White House. Because even with a woman in the power position (Romy’s CEO to Samuel’s junior intern), the symbology of men overpowering women is tired as hell for many. But, like Romy, my own experience of accepting myself as a poly submissive was often hella cringe. And because sex itself is so demonized by our culture, shame keeps many elements of our journeys to sexual acceptance hella cringe.
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I wasn’t always a submissive, but there were signs.
The car ride to downtown Cleveland from my little hometown of Painesville is about forty-five minutes. I loved opportunities for daydream and looked forward to these long drives when the ’87 Buick Skylark’s imperfect panels let in enough highway roar to dull any possibility of conversation. (My father’s blaring 70s rock furthered the cerebral numbness.) As the dilapidated buildings whizzed by, I created stories for them.
Around the exit for highway 91 there was a white brick building with green shutters. For a while, when I was around six or seven, I fantasized that my crush, an older boy in second grade named Phillip, kept me and several other girls inside this mysterious brick building’s basement - in cages. It was a vaguely sexual fantasy, despite my naivete about actual sex. There wasn’t nudity until the daydream evolved at a slightly older age.
I don’t know exactly where this fantasy came from, why from such a young age I was attracted to the idea of being submissive to a dominant man (well, boy). I wasn’t abused or privy to BDSM pornography, certainly. In the BDSM community, many folks resent the commonly held belief that BDSM always evolves out of a history of trauma. For unknown reasons, this dominant/submissive (D/s) fantasy appeared in my brain before I even understood what intercourse is.
Like many folks in the Midwest, however, I grew up with an idealized notion of a submissive woman. The adult men in my life valued women for their looks and “fun”-ness, and sometimes looked down on women with strong opinions - especially if they weren’t physically attractive. I thought myself an ugly child and with my low self-esteem, wanted most to be deemed pretty by men. In my essay for Glamour UK, I also talk about how social anxiety contributes to my personal desires as a submissive.
There are of course other circumstances beyond a broad cultural lens that have likely factored into my desire to be a submissive babygirl. While trauma isn’t always connected to sexual desire, it can be, and everyone raised by Boomers has some childhood trauma worthy of memoir. (I forgive Boomers, though. The so-called Greatest Generation fucked them up even worse than they did to us.) But sure, I definitely have some Daddy issues.
For a long time, like Romy in Babygirl, I hid my interest in being a submissive, and even briefly moonlighted as a Domme (I was unsurprisingly terrible at it). Confused and annoyed that my desires, which seemed innate to me, could somehow be anti-feminist I tried to articulate it in a way that I hoped would draw empathy from my audience. I pushed back on the notion of being a submissive as bad or misogynist.
Around 2013, I wrote a take on Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines video. You can still find this essay if you search hard enough, but it’s buried pretty deep in the hole that was the early blogger internet. In Thicke’s video, women parade around readily topless for Thicke and his cronies. To me, the video was hot. And then it got so much hate for being sexist. I felt dissonance about being into something deemed so anti-feminist, for wanting to be one of those women. Specifically, I wrote:
“Sometimes it feels good to be objectified. The vast majority of us ladies have weathered a minimum of at least 1 or 2 awkward years, which are legit hell for any pre-teen or teen girl. My own awkward years manifested like Hurricane Sandy and just squatted over my life for the general duration, but hey.
Anyone who has felt unattractive at a given point can appreciate feeling attractive. Granted, there is a line between feeling that a man views you as attractive, and feeling that a man views you as a scantily-dressed hamburger, but it’s a goddamn continuum. Some of us enjoy those hamburger moments, and YOU CAN’T TAKE AWAY MY HAMBURGER.”
What was missing from this essay, and my own understanding of D/s (and objectification specifically), was of course the notion of consent.
CONSENT. A word and concept that comes with so much sexual freedom. It’s glorious. Consent is something that should be crystal clear, however, it took the #MeToo movement to make it household vocabulary.
So while I have said a lot of dumb things in writing, knowing what we now know, praising this video is amongst my worst and I wish I could purge this essay from the bowels of the internet cobwebs. We now know that Emily Rajatowski, the star of Thicke’s Blurred Lines video, was groped by Thicke during production. She was so upset by this that she even left the shoot abruptly. Unlike what the video wanted to imply, Rajatowski was not giving her consent for this objectification.
TL; DR for Fake Doms**:
You can grab me by the pussy, but ONLY IF I FUCKING SAY YOU CAN, ASSWAD.
Put another way, by the more eloquent Pamela Stephenson Connolly in The Guardian:
“Consensual sex requires that both partners give permission for what occurs, whether they take on a more passive or a dominant role at any given moment. If someone chooses to assume a submissive erotic position, that is an agreement that he or she could withdraw at any time. So, in fact, the submissive partner is actually the moral controller; if that person wishes to gain physical dominance, he or she must first be sure that permission for that is fully granted by the partner. But while these facts may help you to consider physical submission more ethically palatable, in general, erotic connections are heightened when taboos are broken … including what might be considered a feminist no-no.”
In addition, many kink experts (now there’s a job) recognize that the dom must also freely provide consent. For example, some doms may be comfortable with being in control, but uncomfortable with impact play. However, because a dom is the power position during D/s play, they tend to have a greater responsibility around consent. There are many folks (cough, largely cis-gender men) who still desire to blow past consent and treat a sub with force, degradation, and dominance. Recently, during a convo about consent, a male friend told me that consent isn’t romantic. Without consent there wouldn’t be moments like in the old Bogart movies where a man grabs a woman and kisses her - and I mean obviously she wanted it right?
Despite a slight reduction of glorified dominance-as-assault in media, there’s still one place where lack of consent runs rampant, and that’s mainstream porn. The sky-high popularity of “forced blowjob,” etc. videos in the early 2000s speaks to a time when (unsurprisingly, with a conservative in the White House), millennial men were inundated with images of BDSM without consent.
And, of course, there still exist many Doms who can talk the talk without walking the walk. A few years ago I met a potential dom who boasted about being SSC (Safe, Sane, Consensual), yet still grabbed my chest at a public park without my permission. Two thumbs down. Way down. Down far enough to disembowel you with my pink-painted Hello Kitty nail-stickered fingers.
And back to now. Despite all we’ve learned about consent and #MeToo, we’ve elected a Fake Dom to the highest office in the country.
It feels bad, and it feels scary. And women submissives face an even greater burden to gatekeep fake doms (e.g. doxxing that “Your body, my choice” influencer prick). If submissives are not well-educated and empowered to assert their boundaries and accepted behaviors, there is a greater chance of becoming victimized. And one of the biggest barriers to educating oneself on these issues is shame.
Like the shame I experienced about polyamory, the shame I felt about being a submissive kept me from learning about it. I didn’t want to affiliate with them. For many years I learned that BDSM was weird, and that being a sub is anti-woman. I didn’t want to admit that I was into it. And because of this, I didn’t educate myself and let myself get into some bad situations.
Lack of communication about consent is just another way that men hold women back. Every woman submissive has stories about doms getting annoyed when the submissive puts boundaries in place. (Certainly, this has the potential to be an issue in all D/s relationships regardless of gender, however, in a world where toxic hetero masculinity is king, men usually remain in the sex drunk driver’s seat.)
When I started to transcend shame, I learned about D/s consent and identified a D/s community. Now I have a blueprint for safety. No matter what desires I have, or why I have them, I’m empowered to know that there are other women feminists out there like me, who believe in their right to let a man spank that ass. Because I have a right to my own body and what’s done to it, I have the obligation and thrill of keeping shitty fake doms out.
I’m very grateful to those sex workers and enthusiasts who educate on taboo issues. (There are resources like AskASub for folks who want to understand more about their desires as a submissive.)
I’m eagerly awaiting the media conversation about Babygirl. Romy’s shame was a key factor in her trajectory. How would Romy’s experience have been different if she could openly be a woman submissive? What would’ve been avoided, or simply more satisfying? Let me know in the comments if you saw Babygirl and what you think.
*The idea of a sex strike has been around for eons, dating at least back to Ancient Greece when Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata, a comedy about women seeking to end the violence of the Peloponnesian War by withholding sex from warmongering dudes. (This premise was updated by Spike Lee & Kevin Wilmott in 2015’s Chi-Raq.)
** Fake Dom is a term ascribed to someone who pretends to be down with D/s consent and negotiation but exhibits harassment, assault, or other non-consensual behaviors.
