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Notes -
BDSM relationships are rational and adaptive for (some? many?) modern women
[Epimistic Status: Might just be the girls I date]
Oh boy! Another post on gender and romantic dynamics. Discussions on this topic here tend to go in a few predictable ways, and unfortunately there's a frequent vibe of posters here just not liking women. Leaving aside the whole hypergamy bit, there's frequent sneers about girls being attracted to partners that will mistreat them. This attraction is attributed to two evo psych explanations:
Men with aggressive and dark triad traits are more likely to succeed in gathering resources and accruing power. This makes them valuable mates, but also makes them high risks for physical abuse, infidelity, etc. There's something good correlated with something bad.
Females evolutionarily were frequently coerced by mates. They often didn't get to even choose their mates at all. This goes back all the way to chimps and monkeys. The ones that tolerated the abuse better were more likely to survive and reproduce. One of the pathways to tolerate abuse better is to enjoy it at some level. If you can't really control whether you get hit or not, it's more adaptive to get off on it than have a mental breakdown. The same goes for submissive behavior. Once you're wired deep down to enjoy something, you're going to start seeking it out.
I broadly think these two points are true, and I still like women. I think given submissive and masochistic impulses are wired in, the rational move is satify them while minimizing damage. BDSM relationships (which I'm using here as a catchall for everything from hard power dynamics to good 'ole slapping and choking in bed) are a social technology that fills that role.
Women want things in a partner. They also have different reproductive strategies that don't always neatly coincide. Pretty boys will make pretty daughters. Kind and caring partners are more likely to invest in you and your offspring. Dark triad partners are more likely to be disproportionately successful, but they might hurt you in the process. Straight up abusive partners just need to be survived, and some level of massochism helps.
Some of these reproductive strategies clearly work out a lot better than others. It's much better to end up with a pretty boy than an abusive one, but instincts were evolved when mate choice was much more constrained. Leaving a bad partner is much more of an option now, rendering some of the survival instincts counter produtive. So what's a gal to do with that masochistic drive? Get with a decent partner than have them do BDSM. Much better to be choked by the pretty boy that loves you than the dark triad guy that will actually kill you.
Backdoor on Feminism?
So here's my fringe, underdeveloped thought. Feminism and "womens liberation" broadly decreased the amount women had to submit to their partners. A lot of women liked that change. Some more reactionary ones didn't and explicitly volunteer for more trad lifestyles. I think a lot of women have mixed feelings. They really value the practical gains in freedom in some areas. But in others they didn't really want to stop being submissive. Western blue tribe women are seeped in the idea that feminism is good, and wanting to roll things back is bad. BDSM offers a figleaf for that. It's culture is soaked in the language of consent, so it doesn't contradict feminism. Yep, wearing a collar and being your man's slave is empowering. BDSM offers a framework for picking and choosing what bits of power to keep and return. You can still have your own job, but do everything you husband says at home.
My anecdotes
I had an ex who I was keeping on a leash. She really liked being given orders. One day I asked her to fetch me food a few too many times and she said "I wanted to be your girlfriend, not your servant!" I learned then when girls want to be submissive it's more like they want to be your pet than your maid.
I had two separate exes who ran away from abusive partners and then ended up with me. They were sensible enough to flee at the first sign of trouble. They liked me a fair amount at first, but when I introduced them to BDSM they became enthralled with me. I think early in the relationship were satisfying the Pretty/Caring strategy. Once BDSM hit the mix they felt like they were satisfying Pretty/Caring/Dominant. I think the BDSM community downplays the relationship with domestic violence for PR reasons. There's definitely something there.
It’s basically an open secret nowadays that chicks are turned on by getting violently dominated and degraded. See, for example, the “Choke Me, Daddy” universe of memes. One could also see what literature written By Women For Women looks like. It tends to look inconveniently like Fifty Shades of Grey.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, as it has been long Noticed that women are turned on by nonconsensual escalation or even outright rape, that rape is one of the most common female fantasies, if not the most common. 31% to 62% of women have rape fantasies. Women write hamster-wheeling essays about the topic: “I didn’t want to be aroused by my sexual assault but I was.”
While the rational and/or adaptational element is hard to prove, Noticers have drawn links to the Sexy Son hypothesis, that women prefer men who will leave sexually successful sons. A similar phenomenon that has been well-Noticed is Stockholm Syndrome and War Brides, the hypothesis that women’s mental hardware favor those who conquer them.
Elsewhere in this thread, @HereAndGone2 gave the token effort to blame women’s preferences on men in defending women’s Wonderfulness, as is commonly done by women or male allies so women can save face. Surely it can’t be that women are turned on by getting violently dominated wnd degraded, so it must be men and their pornbrains unilaterally inflicting their perversions upon the hapless victims that are their wives and girlfriends. Another common example that I recently wrote about would be the seethe and cope around the massive female desire for male height, blaming male shittiness and insecurities for women wanting a daddy they can look up to.
Yet, in contrast to the well-trodden copium, female porn viewers are more likely than male porn viewers to opt for “Hardcore” porn on Pornhub, at a rate of +75% and a rate of +63% for “Rough Sex” porn. Given women are about 38% of Pornhub viewers, this would imply that in absolute terms, women exceed men when it comes to Hardcore porn and match men when it comes to Rough Sex porn viewership. Women also “[say] that they orgasm much faster when they have rough sex”:
In responding to @HereAndGone2, @Iconochasm remarked that “FWIW, men commonly report that women are the ones who asked them to try it.” @falling-star recounted that “Every girl I've done that with has been the first to request it. Some of them were extremely insistent.”
This was my experience as well, that it was a girl who steered me further toward the dark side, a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. Possible TMI to follow, but we’re all besties here.
As a young adult, I had long been aware of the female penchant for getting dominated and degraded in bed—including from ample personal experience—but I remained stubborn at the time in my refusal to accept that violence beyond vanilla acts like hair-pulling and spanking would be well-received. Sure, chicks might like getting spanked, facialed, their hair pulled; doing things like rimming, deepthroating, clean ass-to-mouth. But that doesn’t mean they would enjoy things like getting slapped, choked, spat on, pissed on, dirty ass-to-mouth, throat-fucked-until-vomiting, right? Any evidence otherwise would just be porn territory and men exaggerating their Lived Experiences with women… right?
Everything changed when the female nation attacked.
I was innocently in the middle of a one night (well, it was actually the afternoon) stand with a chick I had been texting with for a few months, but hadn’t visited her city for a while until then. While in bed she demanded I slap her in the face, repeating the request a few times—each time more insistent—before I was like “haha what, no—are you nuts?” She tried to verbally convince me for a bit more until slapping me in the face in an attempt to rile me up. I grabbed her wrists as she tried to land subsequent shots, manhandling her in continuing the trip to Pound Town, doing the usual vanilla things like hairpulling and spanking.
At no point did I slap her back in the face since I was still unsure of the female appetite for violence, still reluctant due to never-hit-a-girl instincts, nor did I want to provide positive reinforcement to a girl for slapping me. We parted ways more than amicably, and years later she still occasionally texts/DMs me asking when I’ll return to her city.
The experience gnawed at me though and caused me to question my handling of women for the first time in a long time (and the last time since then). Was I nerfing myself all this time by not providing chicks with the violent dominance and degradation they crave? Was I like Federer who stuck all too long with the 90-inch racket instead of upgrading to the 97-inch sooner? Do I need to add to my bag acts like slapping, choking, spitting on chicks’ faces and/or in their mouths?
On the other hand, I was also saying to myself “No way, no way. This is crazy,” like Neo after he opened his office high rise’s window, debating whether or not to climb onto the ledge.
Curiosity got the best of me and won out; I took the (p)ledge. I don’t recall if it was the next girl I banged or a few girls after, but I decided to YOLO and go for it on a first date at the AirBnB of the next city on my trip.
She initially insisted that I wear a condom and that she didn’t like oral sex; however, after a few rounds of slapping, choking, and spitting in her mouth, guess who was enthusiastically sucking dick and getting rawdogged? Damn, it was just like the prophecies foretold.
The next morning she cheerfully brushed her hair and applied make-up to cover up the bruising on her face that had begun. She said to me, “thank you, that was amazing” and gave me a kiss before heading off to her office job in the same clothes from the night before. Fortunately for her, it’s so common for chicks to thotmaxx with their office attire that a girl’s first date outfit need not standout in the office.
Still in somewhat denial, I repeated this experiment several times thereafter to increase the sample size For Science. Every time I gave it a go chicks loved it. Not only that, the further I pushed the envelope the better the reaction. Sigh. ben_affleck_smoking_a_cigarette.jpg
So to restate: She told you to use a condom and that she didn't want to fellate you, but you slapped, choked, and spat on her and then she acquiesced.
This sounds rather more like your thing than hers, though of course reported narratives are often misremembered and/ot relevant detail inadvertently left out.
Hail Mary attempt to Just-World and protect women's wonderfulness.
Admirable, but mistaken. However, without the admirable part.
In the comment I left, already there was recounting about the positive feedback from her in person. Much less the positive feedback that followed thereafter.
Always a pleasure, Sloot. Did you just assume the positive feedback beforehand? Or lucked into it?
Obviously I assumed the feedback would be positive before initiating, based on reading her vibes, prior experiences with the general female penchant for being sexually submissive, the prior experience with the girl who literally asked for it, and general background knowledge.
Why would I do something (anything in general) if I assumed the feedback would be negative or the EV suboptimal? If I go up for a layup in pickup basketball (even if I haven't tried that exact type of layup against that particular team before), it's because I believe that's the highest EV play at the time, not because I think I'll airball it to start a fast break for the other team.
As I have written here before, I think your takes are often insightful, if bitter pills. I also think your generalizations are probably too wide and confined to a subset of hot/mildly damaged women (all of us, men and women, are at least mildly damaged) and that your ability to calibrate/"read the vibes" isn't a particularly transferable skill. I also think what she wants and what is good (healthy if you prefer) for her (to say nothing of what is good for me/a man) are often not the same. In other words maybe in her secret garden she has a nice rape fantasy planted; that doesn't mean that I do, or that I'm interested at all in accommodating her.
I've been married 20+ years, I'm under no illusion that women are necessarily wonderful, but I'm also convinced that we're fundamentally different (male and female) well beyond simply plumbing, and that one aspect of our role as men is to be protective. I wouldn't want to indulge some girl's getting off on her own self-loathing any more than I'd want her exacerbating, for sexual kicks, my own (to what degree any self-loathing remains after 50 years of systematically eradicating it).
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Let this bitter old hag congratulate you on successfully dodging rape and/or assault charges, if your lemans regularly showed up at work with bruises on their faces. Perhaps skipping from town to town and only hooking up with the freaks saved you there, but I think you still dodged a bullet and had immense luck.
Thank you, I suppose, self-identified bitter old hag. It's like the meme:
Young Man: I consent
Young Woman: I consent
Older Woman: I don't
Things may be more bleak than I imagined, if one has to be congratulated for consensual experiences with young women without false rape/assault accusations due to female mendacity or the institutional misandry of the State. You have some horseshoe/epic handshake potential with the ultra red/black-pilled.
Bruises were light, difficult to spot even if you were looking for them. Less ostensible than blush makeup or just regular blushing. And given the habit of young women to paint their faces, easily covered.
No True Non-freak.
You're still ducking that 31% to 62% of women have rape fantasies, that women orgasm faster during rough sex, that women regularly sploosh for female-oriented media like Fifty Shades of Grey and 365 Days, among other things.
Like I mentioned, as a man of science I repeated the experiment... if anything, only ramping things up.
Well foof me sideways, brother, I owe you an apology.
The Romanian Eurovision entry. I don't know if it's Romanians in general or just Romanian women, but yeah. When your song is called Choke Me it's pretty straightforward about what she wants.
Whatever happened to wholesome family-friendly fare like this? 😁
EDIT: Meanwhile the Italians are being romantic, all you need to get married is what every woman wants - a man in a shiny tracksuit!
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So a girl tra-la-la-ed back to your AirBnB, got down with you in BDSM Lite, then the next morning went off to work in the same clothes as she'd been wearing the night before on the pull, but she also had her full makeup kit with her to cover the light bruising.
I believe every single word of this!
I've mentioned this many times before, but my usual strategy is to have girls meet me in the lobby of the building I'm staying in (or where I l live) or right outside of it. Thus cutting out the logistical and psychological step of pulling her back there from some outside venue.
This is not unusual at all. If her outfit isn't too slutty or informal, it's not like her coworkers will know that's what she wore on a date the night before. I myself have done it aplenty after staying over at girls' places (or crashing at male friends' places) when I had internships or jobs where the dress code was more informal. I've also done it even after sleeping in my own bed, because I woke up late and the nearest fit I could most quickly grab was the one I wore out the night before.
Who said anything about a full makeup kit? It's pretty common for chicks to keep in their handbags a streamlined assortment of makeup accessories (e.g., the more essential staples like lip stick/gloss/balm, foundation/concealer, eyeliner, mascara) as they go about their day—and especially for nights out—for refreshening, touch-ups, and adjustments. And indeed, speaking of a full makeup kit, some women actually do lug a full makeup kit (and perfume) around in their bags too, not just a skeleton crew of accessories.
I've also had personal experience for myself on this front, not only having observed what women do. I keep a tube of liquid foundation (many foundations are foundation/concealer hybrids nowadays) around my place, and take it with me when I travel. In the past on days when my skin has been subpar, I'd apply it before going out or before a date arrived. I'd also carry it around in my pocket in case I need to do any reapplications. Just a tube would have been more than enough to cover hypothetical light bruising on my cheeks dozens of times, if said bruising would even be noticeable to someone else in the first place.
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So look, I am admit I am skeptical of your story (men lie about sex too, especially in self-aggrandizing ways, and it's so convenient that it turns out every woman you've fucked turns out to be exactly the kind of shameless slutwhore you are constantly saying all women are), but let's say we take this all at face value, all the women you've tried it with turned out to love being slapped, spit on, and throatfucked without asking. I mean, yes, I believe there are a non-trivial percentage of women who are into that.
But there are also a non-trivial percentage of women who aren't. Even taking your "31% to 62% of women have rape fantasies at face value" (you do know that those "rape fantasies" are usually more like 50 Shades of Grey and not like Clockwork Orange, right? i.e.., they are fantasizing about being pleasurably dominated by an attractive man while abdicating responsibility for their own choices, not about some rando violently assaulting them) - that means 38% to 69% don't.
Serious question: if you tried that shit with some woman who turned out to be very much not into that, what would you do? Whine about how bitches lie and entrap men when you find yourself facing charges?
That indeed can sometimes happen, as I lampshaded with my consideration of "men exaggerating." What also happens is men hating on the experiences of other men to protect their own egos and the Wonderfulness of women.
When you do something that others perceive as unusual, there will often be haters—or ankle-biters if you will, to borrow a phrase you've used a few times.
I'm aware of such white-washing attempts to salvage women's rape fantasies, even if the white-washed version still lies outside the Overton window in popular discourse. Regardless of how true the white-washing is, the "rando" hypothetical is irrelevant. If a woman is having drinks with you alone in your apartment, chances are you're already much closer to Christian Grey in her eyes and much farther away from some "rando," just as Scalabrine is closer to Lebron than you or I are to the White Mamba.
...fantasize about it so strongly and frequently that they admit it in a study. I don't doubt there's a non-zero number of women who don't have rape fantasies. However, seeing as light-BDSM is well, lighter, than rape—the 31% to 62% is a floor for the proportion of women who are turned on by light-BDSM (or heavier).
It's not a serious question at all, just a loaded one to smuggle in "whine" and "yourself facing charges" as if guilt is presupposed and any defense unmerited and illegitimate.
Begin an answer with "no," and it sounds like you're conceding that you're guilty and did something wrong. Begin an answer with "yes," and it sounds like you're admitting that you're a whiner whose best defense is attempting to claim that "bitches lie and entrap men."
The boy/man moving things along without explicitly asking the girl/woman is often a prerequisite for heterosexual courtship, including things more mundane than light-BDSM such as a kiss. An unwanted kiss could be considered criminal (sexual) battery, assault, and/or harassment, the combination of which depending on jurisdiction. You can ask yourself:
Sneer noted, but I am neither jealous of your sexual experiences nor trying to protect the Wonderfulness of women. You are kind of like early Kulak, in that I am not sure how seriously to take you and whether you are just playing a character in preparation for taking your act on the road (to Twitter).
I don't think the "white-washed version" (that women fantasize about being dominated and ravished by a man they were already attracted to) is outside the Overton window in popular discourse. It is outside the range of acceptable discourse in feminist circles, but we weren't talking about those, were we? The Rhett Butler/Scarlett Ohara staircase scene is something everyone instinctively understands even if feminists call it rape.
I don't know what the actual percentage is and how each individual woman would qualify what she is turned on by. What I am disputing is the extrapolation you are making, from "most women like being dominated and get turned on by a little rough play" to "women like being raped."
No, it was a serious question. Granted, I don't think you're serious, and no, I don't believe your claims that you go straight for choking, spitting and smacking and every woman likes it.
Sure, I'll give you a serious answer. If I am kissing a woman who didn't want to be kissed, I've made a pretty serious error in judgment. Supposing I tried the Humphrey Bogart "forceful kiss" and miscalculated, if I were then facing charges, either I done fucked up (how do you try to a kiss a woman who is so not into it that she presses charges?) or I should stay away from BPD chicks. Would I whine about it? Well, I'd probably feel pretty disgruntled about trying to stick my dick in crazy and it backfiring, but you can simultaneously acknowledge that women aren't all wonderful and also that you should probably be pretty sure someone you kiss (or choke or spit on or beat) will be into it.
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I've recently started listening to Malcolm Collins, and his take is that female sexuality is dimorphic. Historically women have had the possibility of living in two distinct possible scenarios: safe pair bonds, or prostitute/sex-slaves. If someone is born to a family with a reasonable amount of money and get married to a single man, she is best off if she mates with him and has a bunch of children and remains loyal to him. His wealth is her children's wealth, his prosperity is her children's prosperity, and the more love and attention she gives him the more she will get from him. Therefore, women release high levels of oxytocin when having sex the first few times, which develops this bond.
On the other hand, if foreign tribes come in and conquer, they kill the men and steal the women. The woman has no choice about what will happen to her, she's going to have sex with lots of men or she's going to be killed. There is no advantage to bonding with any of these men, they're going to pass her around and use her anyway, often violently. She might as well adapt to being a sex slave and hope she can please the men enough that they want to keep her alive for more. Similarly, a poor women forced into prostitution is going to get used and abused, she might as well adapt to it to survive. Pair-bonding with any of these men would be maladaptive, since she can't be loyal to them even if she wanted to, and they're likely bad men and won't reciprocate loyalty with resources. So after having sex enough times the oxytocin response to sex weakens with each additional iteration.
Therefore, the proliferation of BDSM fetishes in modern times follows biologically from promiscuity culture. Women have enough sex with enough different men that their brains shift into sex slave survival mode. They don't expect to have a single loving partner who loves them and wants to share resources with them willingly, so they adapt to survive and enjoy the life they expect. It's not women's biology training them to look at all the possible options for who to choose as a mate and rationally/selfishly trying to maximize resources compared to picking a safer husband, it's an adaptation to a historical environment where sometimes women had no agency in who to choose as a mate at all, and they're just trying to do the best they can with the mates forced upon them.
I think I tentatively believe this story, it anecdotally tracks with things I've observed and what I know about biology and sex, though the correlation between BDSM and promiscuity could be confounded by the causation going the other way (or just promiscuous people being more willing to admit to having a BDSM fetish while shy, monogamous people keep it to themselves). But I think this idea has some merit.
I don't really buy the link between BDSM and promiscuity. I was the first for the partner that got me into BDSM. Even as a virgin she was into the idea of it and wanted to try it out with me. I also doubt the historical story you're telling about coerced sex being largely promiscuous. My understanding is that when a woman was historically kidnapped, they either ended up as a "war bride" or a slave to a specific man/household. I don't think going into a brothel was the median case. There's the whole story of the Rape of the Sabine Women, where they were kidnapped to be wives for Romans. There, I think it did matter to bond to their abductors (Stockholm syndrome). Bonding effectively was a gambit to raise their status from sex slave to wife.
I think there's a probable link between early sexual activity (esp. the coerced or semi-coerced sort) and later BDSM proclivities. It might impact the extremity to which they'll ultimately go.
But the flip side is, well, a lot of really normal women were happy to watch Fifty Shades.
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My unfortunate anecdotal observation is that couples who do take BDSM practice 'seriously' are often harboring deeper mental scars or issues that they've convinced themselves are just kinky preferences and that can be managed within their structured (or not so structured) relationship.
In the worst cases (by no means the majority!) its all codependency, where "I need to hurt somebody to get out my latent aggression" meets "I need to be hurt as punishment for my shame" and neither is addressing the cause of the latent aggression or the source of the internalized shame.
The sexual release part might be over-emphasized, indeed, because all the complicated rules around consent, exchange of power, following protocols, maintaining rigid roles... that requires an emotionally stable person to maintain long term. Whereas many participants seem to just be chasing the fleeting dopamine high. And many many people who stumble into BDSM (especially with the mainstreaming of it post-Fifty Shades) are emotionally broken people who think they've found a way to make their own mental struggles somebody else's' responsibility.
I suspect once again that its something that can be practiced within a standard marital relationship... if the marriage is in fact the foundation of it, and they're not trying to cludge things together by accepting certain aspects of trad marriage but avoiding the parts that actually require emotional effort... and neglect the optimizations for having kids.
Anyhow, there's probably something to your point:
If feminists want to backdoor in the patriarchy without admitting the trads were right or that they've been led astray, then just let things evolve to Gorean standards but make it clear "its all consent and everyone can opt out if they want" and 'letting' the men keep 'slaves' and make the important decisions but really its all about the fulfillment of womens' need for release of control, and the women in fact DEMANDED this release from a position of power." No oppression here! Just everyone letting their freak flag fly!
But man, the idea of keeping some sizeable portion of the female population as, effectively, "pets" as you indicate seems really tiring to me. Its not what my dream for society is, despite what some may think based on my overall position on the gender wars. The fact that women may have an occasional innate desire to submit to higher powers is, in my view, simply not something to build an entire society around. That also includes the part of that desire that makes them seek out the highest-power male in the vicinity and compete for his attention. NOT a good organizing principle for civilization.
Ultimately, the solution will involved de-centering women and their desires/demands in favor of longer-term goals... and THAT is what they simply will not abide.
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If you're a straight man and you're not open to some BDSM elements in your relationship, you're gimping yourself, disappointing your lovers, and quite possible driving them away all together.
My personal anecdata, not nearly enough for a real sample but too many too ignore, is that more women are into BDSM than men are, every time I've gotten kinkier it's the girl driving it, even as what she wants is for me to drive it.
That said, discussing BDSM is difficult because we lack good terminology. You have the intellectualizing kink purists who have an attitude that there are regulations and you can only call it kink if you do xyz, "it's only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling abuse." They're eager to avoid connections with the pagan, chthonic reality of most kinky sex people engage, in favor of a universe dominated by experienced extremists engaging in carefully curated and regulated activities. You have the prudes of both feminist and christian denominations, who perhaps no longer think that anything other than procreative missionary is sinful but asymptotically approach that logic as they go. And you have the broad mass of horny normies who don't really bring ideology into sex, driven by the porn industry that just wants to make money lying to you.
There's layers to what kink can mean, but for the most part I think a missing element people avoid is play. Sexuality is one of the few spaces where we allow true play as adults, creative imagination, pretending to be someone else. That can be formally ("You're the student turning in a late paper and I'm the strict professor") or informally (imagining oneself in the image of the platonic ideal of sexy, inhabiting that archetype in your mind, without saying a word). Per Dan Savage, it's Cops and Robbers with your pants off.
Sex has become the only space of true play and risk in the modern world for many adults.
Well yeah, because it's a power thing.
Could you imagine if men were allowed to think that women liked sex? They'd never be able to extract rent from that resource if that was the case- you'd have a bunch of women trying to have sex with men and men returning the favor, with very few strings attached. Plus, imagine if the woman were able to avoid the risks of pregnancy by taking a pill?
The value of sex would go to basically zero- how's a woman going to secure a man now? They'd have to rely on other stuff, like being a decent human being[1], to ever have a chance at bagging a man where body counts are not just expected, but not having one suggests some defect.
That's why non-missionary sex has to be a sin- so that women have an excuse to never acknowledge it's a thing, and have an excuse to shut other people up who claim that it is, and men aren't allowed to initiate a thing even if somehow they break through that censorship and discover it exists.
But to people who know better than that, it's nothing but virtue Georgism. Yes, BDSM can be an infohazard for imbalanced relationships where the BDSM dynamics are, uh, also happening outside of the bedroom (and not in the good way)- and then the question becomes, as so many questions of this nature do, about forcibly redistributing virtue from those who can handle [the truth] to those who can't, and suppressing [the truth] is part of the way in which that is done.
[1] The feminist and [this type of] Christian here are alike in that they're using their group membership to justify not working against a below-average personality. Being stingy and begrudging are personality flaws, but the [particular versions of these] outlooks are the same in that they define holiness as leaning into those flaws, not away from them.
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Yes, and based on women’s porn preferences, we have solid scientific studies backing up that claim.
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I think this is focusing too hard on the BDSM element. As others have mentioned, very few women want an erotic master 24/7, especially if it involves menial labor. OTOH, most women appreciate a man who is confident and commanding most of the time - especially if he can escalate that in a darker direction during sex.
It's a difficult line to walk, and I think most advice for men leans way too hard in one direction or the other. Somewhat ironically, I think the meme trad Christian approach might work best, but only if you never acknowledge that that's what you're doing. Act like you're the captain of the relationship, with her as your trusted first mate (and tolerate her lack of a Riker beard), but never make that explicit.
And kindly insert a bunch of tedious throat-clearing about spectrums and Not All Women, etc, etc. Thanks.
I've got some personal experience with the kink community. I had an ex-girlfriend who ultimately had tastes way more hardcore than my own, but we dabbled a bit with the Feelds of the world whilst we were together and I've kept up socially with her since and she's been pretty open about what she's getting up to.
Most of what I've got from here is a bit of a weird mess of things where there's explicitly a bunch of subcategories of doms that a lot of women are interested in trying out for an experiential thing but they'd generally not be 'boyfriend material' or kinda in their own category where the same woman who's consenting to do shibari or whatever would also swipe left on them for a casual hookup since they're not hot enough. Shibari guys being a common thread of this where it's something a lot of women are into, but the sort of personality that actually puts enough effort into learning the skillset tends to be kinda neurotic and annoying. This kinda thing is generally the best shot of 'single unaccompanied hetero guy getting to dom women he doesn't know', and even that tends to require a ton of social proof since there's countless stories of 'random guy claims to be able to do X, Y & Z on feeld since he watched 2 videos on it on pornhub but doesn't know the artisan skillset required'.
Which is massively digressing, but nonetheless I do hear that a lot of girls feel that guys are unwilling to match their desired level of take-control in sex.
Were you unicorn hunting, or was this a "we're just looking around" kind of a thing?
I will say that the idea of a "BDSM hookup" is pretty ridiculous to me, much moreso even than normal hookups. I'd want to know a person pretty seriously before engaging in anything on this side of the asteroid belt of risky sexual behavior, let alone power exchange.
Unicorn hunting a bit though that was its own tiresome thing and the relationship was prettymuch already over when we decided to go more FWBish.
Oof. Unicorn hunting is its own bit of insanity, and it sounds like she's the one who pushed for it.
Do you feel regret when you see what she's up to, or is this an "I'm glad I dodged a bullet there" kind of a thing?
I'm married with kids now and she's decidedly not those things. She's still great to talk to + a lot more popculture interests in common than my wife, but also my life is very much better than it'd be if I'd remained with her.
Unicorn hunting/open relationships as a guy just insane juice-to-squeeze ratio unless you're really good at scoring casual sex. I'm attractive enough to be capable of it but it's still a grind of apps and relationship management and not some sort of 'I'll organically go to da club and pull with chutzpah' thing so why do I want to add a massive chunk of complication and stress to my monogamous sex life by adding something I'd essentially consider a chore to occasionally get laid by another woman.
I'm a little interested that you two still talk, but I guess you transitioned into friends towards the end.
Normally unicorn hunting describes a couple looking to date together/trying to put together an MFF threesome. If you were essentially in an open relationship and dating/hooking up separately... yeah, that's a relationship that was about to end.
Glad to know you embraced monogamy and cisheteronormativity. It exists for a reason.
I mean like maybe swap messages every couple months or when new media comes out in a shared series.
Dabbled with both but even MMF Unicorn hunting it's not like you just snap your fingers and a fully-formed third party just appears out of the aether. The dynamic would definitely be different if I were a NBA player or something where 'finding a third' was just half-assedly scouting my IG DMs but as a 6.5 on a good day I'm massively increasing my stress level for sporadic and moderate pleasures.
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Looking at the history of it, I believe BDSM as an edifice is some kind of ersatz replacement for roles that naturally exist in straight relationships but not outside of them, and which progressivism has been doing its best to stomp out. You don't need to figure out who's the dom and who's the sub in 99% of straight relationships, that's been sorting itself out for thousands of years. All the wacky Red Pill stuff and most war-of-the-sexes discourse is clumsily rediscovering what every boomer knew but didn't teach their kids: guys being confident and capable and taking charge is hot, being a doormat/simp/whatever, even for your girlfriend/wife, is not. That applies in daily interactions and in bed, without needing a bunch of crazy roleplay. YMMV, NAWALT, NAMALT, etc, etc, etc.
I mean I agree to a degree though also the more elaborate 'kink' side of the spectrum kinda exists as performance art in its own right. Stuff like 'I want a daddydom to fill my breeding kink uwu' is pretty clearly 'I want a socially-sanctioned way to express desire for normative gender roles' but 'I wanna go in the latex fart chamber' is just being a normal German.
Yeah, though I think it's not really a spectrum and more two separate things divided by a gulf, with a bunch of confusing language layered over top of it to make it seem like they're a spectrum. (complicated by all the sort of "orientation-washing" going on with bdsm/kink stuff as a way to launder straight relationships as queer or to launder really out there fetishes as identity which actively benefits from those two things looking like ends of a spectrum)
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Louise Perry, who I find it impossible not to quote when it comes to gender discourse, suggests that the increasing popularity of BDSM is from couples who crave the natural gender polarity you would see in most societies (from hunter gatherers up to 1950s suburbia) but which has been lost in the age of the email job.
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In the mixed-sex PMC circles I've been in, if a guy articulates that while he is personally dominant and works best with a partner that gives him deference but states he doesn't think this applies to all men or women, he generally doesn't get messed with much. Part of it was probably the guys who I've heard articulate this were pretty socially adroit/attractive, but framing things as "this is a me thing" vs. "this is a sex thing in general" seems to be pretty effective in avoiding criticism.
This is speculation, but I think a guy saying "this is a me thing" lets feminists who may be insecure about what type of relationship they like keep distance from it, while them saying "this is a sex thing" makes them feel a need to dispute it since by definition, "sex things" have to do with all members of a sex.
What's PMC? Private military corporation? Didn't realize there were so many insecure feminists in blackwater these days.
Professional Managerial Class. People who work in jobs that require advanced degrees, or hold high level positions, considered as a class in the Marxist sense.
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Step 1 and Step 2 with a fig leaf.
The close friend who went furthest in the PMC is extremely controlling in his relationships, to a point that even seen from a remove it would be hard to defend him from the "abuse" tag. That's one of the reasons I'm not too sad that friendship dried up with time and distance.
But his charisma and attractiveness were a meme even in high school. And when you're a tall, handsome executive living in a swanky DC suburb, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy in front of their friends. You can do anything.
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There’s many kinds of BDSM frameworks but as far as I know, the “doing everything your husband says at home” 24/7 dynamic is not typical and the average BDSM relationship is more about having “sessions/scenes” with explicit boundaries. But in either case consent isn’t a figleaf, it’s absolutely essential and it’s extremely, extremely unadvisable to do a scene without safe words and having talked about your limits.
BDSM is basically role play. You’re not rolling anything back or contradicting feminism, you’re playing at being a slave and you can stop at any time. Same with CNC, it’s a way to live out a fantasy that would be extremely distressing if it happened for real and you had no way to stop it. I’m not sure “empowering” is the right word to use, but you have a certain kind of power by voluntarily entering a dynamic as submissive, because in a way, the dom is performing for your pleasure, the pressure is on them to do a good job, and if they don’t, you can just stop the entire scene.
It’s obvious to me but the point is for the scenario to be kinky, not practical. Not many subs would be turned on by being ordered to do their dom’s tax returns, which is probably what would happen if the scenario was real instead of just a fantasy for their sexual gratification.
Full service submissive exist, but they’re up there with findom subs and consensual cuckolds for rarity, having pretty esoteric hard nos, and for being overwhelmingly (cis) male.
I’d… also spell out that the more complicated the submissive’s focus, the more likely there’s a narrative they need. Some BDSM doesn’t: for some masochists, they just had a hard medical experience in early puberty involving chronic pain, a cut or injection or pressure made the pain stop, and surprise surprise, that cut or puncture or pressure takes a whole new meaning. Some bondage or dominance subs, the ‘narrative’ is just ‘oh no don’t make me do this thing I want but don’t want make myself admit’.
But even for masochism, that’s not the only variant. ‘I’ve been a bad girl/boy/whatever’ is a cliche, but it’s a cliche that exists for a reason, and that’s to separate the blame from the responsibility. It literally only feels good if you ‘deserve’ it, or you want the release of anxiety from having fucked up and being ‘free’ of that, or it shreds something core to your identity and self-idealation. That’s near-certainly the punchline to Yudkowsky’s Math Pets thing, for those who remember it. Bondage can be about not successfully doing something, or being ‘forced’ into something they’d want to do, or having something you’d normally not think twice about become ‘impossible’.
Even matters like free use aren’t psychologically free. You gotta work with your sub and understand them if you don’t want to breed resentment.
I believe light maledom/femsub dynamics are on a continuum with normal heterosexuality, but extreme BDSM in general, and particularly femdom/malesub dynamics are disruptions that speak to fundamental psychological problems and not kink-as-play.
My crackpot theory is that straight male subs are driven by their actual schemas and beliefs about the world, not by raw sexual desire. Their submission fantasies are actually a means of separating themselves from their sexual desires, which they believe they aren't worthy to fulfill. Submission becomes a sublimation of the sexual into the enjoyment of denial. "I may not be worthy of having sex with a woman, but I can serve her non-sexual needs." "I may not be able to please a woman, but I can watch and faciliate as she is pleased by another man."
The 'upside' is that you're at least acknowledged by a woman, even if you're humiliated by it. But if your schema of the world tells you that you're unlovable and unfuckable, sexually worthless, then being humiliated by a woman is at least something, some kind of involvement with her, and that's better than nothing.
IMO, this is far, far more common as a fantasy or desire than the actual number of people practicing it, almost entirely due to the complete lack of female dominants.
Female dominants have their own problems -- one thing is there's like 5 of them for every 1 trillion men who want to find one. But also I believe that women who sexually dominate men are almost exclusively 1) mentally ill, and dangerous, predatory or 2) doing it because their male partner got them into it, and his enjoyment of it positively reinforced it or 3) into it because they actually want something else and they've sublimated that desire into dominance.
On #1, IMO, this is not the sort of thing you say at a dinner party, but I believe the majority of self-initiated female dominants are psychopaths, extreme narcissists, or in general people with serious mental disorders who see sexual domination as a power trip. They're often surprised at how low male subs are willing to go, and being able to push against boundaries and find nothing pushing back is the sort of thing that predatory people have always done. An uncomfortable number of female dominants are little more than Warren Jeffs in a dress.
Because of the dearth of female dominants, male subs are often desperate and willing to put up with almost anything, and this is a really, really bad posture to have when entering into a power exchange relationship. "Exploring this side of my sexuality is too dangerous given the environment" needs to be the fallback. But if people were able to do that with their sexuality broadly we'd live in a better world.
On #3, I've seen women who really just wanted to be in a mutualistic and affectionate relationship describe it as a "female led relationship", and their conception of this is literally "having a honey-do list" and "being the one who buys the groceries." I've seen women who simply wanted a man who admired them describe it as "femdom" because their husband called them ugly and they wanted a man she could order to call her beautiful. I've seen women who genuinely wanted a relationship in which she could expect an orgasm now and again describe this as "femdom," because her big idea was that she could order a guy to go down on her.
"Maybe if I get leverage over men and form a relationship in which I'm In Charge, then I can get what I want" is the logic there. In that sense I'm not sure that I can say definitively whether or not it's simply the same phenomenon as the redpill discourse, but from another angle. It's power relations as the resigned second-choice after affection and intimacy didn't work out.
And of course, the biggest portion of #3 is dominatrixes/'findom' 🙄 where "the thing they want" is simply money, and because there's far more demand for female domination than supply, money is a... workable selection mechanism and it's one that many men are willing to pay. Often for crumbs -- again, male subs are desperate, and the amounts of money men are willing to pay to be indifferently humiliated by a woman flabbergasts me. I read a story on the internet once about a mildly sexually traditional woman who got into doing paid femdom chats on the internet, was utterly disgusted by it, but kept going because she made wildly good money. The oldest profession in the world is quite remunerative.
I personally believe a big part of the large numbers of female submissives has to do with women genuinely desiring hot sex, but feeling ashamed of this, for traditional ('sex is sinful'), status ('don't be a slut'), and feminist ('male sexuality objectifies women') reasons.
It's hard to overstate how much of the past 20 years has been a sustained attempt at putting in the water supply a level of cynicism about women's sexuality re: men that competes with the Victorians in terms of how bad it makes people feel about sex. As a teenage boy, I actually believed women got exactly zero pleasure from vaginal intercourse -- not just that they typically couldn't have an orgasm from it, but that they genuinely felt nothing, it had no level of satisfaction either physical or psychological for them and they did it entirely because men made them do it, and then when I actually started having sex and she enjoyed it and said she wanted to do more of it I was utterly shocked. She was too!
It's also not hard to find women whose three extreme kink interests are exactly the same: "free use", breeding, and CNC. In other words, sexual instrumentalization, impregnation, and rape. What are women desperately afraid of? What are the complaints we hear from women about their fears of men? They're afraid of being sexually instrumentalized ("objectification"), being stuck with a pregnancy ("deadbeat dad"/"men want to control women's bodies"), and rape, which of course needs no reference because its badness is clear.
IMO, I think this is another form of painful (and not always true) schemas about the world being sublimated into a kind of resigned acceptance, and therefore made in some way pleasurable or sought-out. These young women believe that the state of the world is such that all women can expect is sexual instrumentalization, impregnation, and assault, and seeking out explicit BDSM relationships becomes a way of finding a man who will at least admit that's what he's doing, and provide a safe word escape route from the experience of being treated like a warm body by a man's sexual desire that wants nothing else from her.
It's "all sex is rape" being taken to its ultimate conclusion, formalized and made explicit, even to the point where a submissive woman's desire for sex is sublimated into it. If this is the dark and unforgiving world a woman lives in, and every man is in fact a rapist-in-waiting, then the only option available, unconsciously and psychologically, is to find one who will at least be nice about it.
I guess you can say I have ethical and psychological critiques of the kink community. I don't believe they're in general bad people (although predators love to wear the language of kink like sheep's clothing), but I do think there are unexamined psychological problems, pain, and mental illnesses that seriously affect the community and those deserve to be interrogated.
[disclaimer: I might be reading past you, given some other discussions you put forward separating this-category-objection from stuff like hotwifing or stag-and-vixen or other sub/dom-themed-but-not-matching kinks. I've tried to trim this down so it isn't a tl;dr of completely missing your point if so, but I apologize if I did in fact just miss your point.]
If you're just saying the physics, biology, and psychology aren't friendly to it, I'll agree with and go further than that. Even if you go looking for a power bottom, male or female, the relevant mucus membranes in question get tired out a lot faster than a top will get chaffed; if you go looking to get pegged, the artificiality of a sex toy is practically small fries compared to how quickly even fit women tire of thrusting; if you want to get beaten black-and-blue, it's actually a pretty big psychological ask for the person with the flogger. For some stuff, there's not even the potential for direct interplay: there are definitely women pegging tops who match pretty well philosophically with male subs, but a male foot fetish sub and a female foot domme are usually looking for entirely different things.
But I don't think "a sublimation of the sexual into the enjoyment of denial" is the only, or even most common, response.
((Hell, I'm not convinced it's even the most common source of denial fetish, though it probably is top for heterosexual men.))
That class does exists: the whole self-flaggelating 'hit me because my boner is evil' thing does happen sometimes, the human pet who's about getting stuffed into a cage and ignored, the guys who are into chastity not because the denial or test makes the sex hotter but because it's about being desexualized or unmanned, the cuckolds that are only visible in the scene to make sure they're not getting off or pathetic for getting off, so on. There's some finesse about whether the influencers are 'deliberately' inflaming the kink, rather inflaming the treatment of heterosexual male desire as fundamentally unhealthy, but to be fair that's somewhere between asking about how many angels dance on the head of a pin and tomato-tomatoe sorta difference.
So I'm definitely not debating whether it's present or got that directionality, or that (most) of it is unhealthy.
I'm skeptical that it's massive, growing, or that common. I can understand why it feels that way, given the tendency for media involving this genre to end up shoved into random unrelated spaces, to be extremely off-putting, and to be hard to avoid without getting exposed to the off-putting parts.
The numbers are a good deal more complicated. That's with the caveat that statistics aren't very available or reliable, as evidenced by anyone taking Aella seriously, and what statistics are available merge stuff that's clearly inside the category as from outside. But we don't see cuckolding or male humiliation overtaking a lot of more mainstream kinks, or even weirder kinks that act as sublimation of prohibited desire for sex, on sites specifically focused around fantasy.
That's not quite the fantasy. There's a fair argument that this is incredibly 'safe horny' - it's not quite 'step on me' bad, but it's still pretty intentionally portrayed so that the man's sexuality is 'blameless' or 'victimized' - but it's still recognizing the male as an object of desire, if sometimes a lopsided or goofy one. This is not a video written from any perspective but androphilia and value-of-men, even if it's also very much not going to have the man top afterward.
That's not common, from either side. It can still be psychosexually weird: the full service sub wants to prove himself 'worthy of sex' by doing chores, human pets want to prove themselves a good boy (and get weird about those literal words) as a way of replacing or burying inhibitions, the guys who need to be bound so their second thoughts don't fuck over their boner. Hell, there's a not-undeserved reputation for het male subs as selfish because they have a sexual script centering around them and their orgasm even as they're 'worshipping' a woman in ways that require her to bend over backwards.
((Not always literally, but the figurative parts can be worse. Yoga has nothing on what a foot fetishist demands of their 'tops', and asking a loved one of any gender to hit you hard is a psychologically big ask!))
This class exists, but I'd caution that they're going to be overrepresented in both the literature and in the markets (for lemon reasons).
There's a lot of psychosexually weird stuff that favors femdom. A bound sub is 'unthreatening', and there's a lot of reasons women find that a lot easier to get or stay in the mood. Bruises and cuts and piercings are a way of making a male sub 'yours, irrecoverably', and women don't have to be so possesive as to be mentally ill to want that. Chastity can be a way of making sure everything he does, he does for you, and then after-orgasm overstimulation can get a guy to do the funnest and most attractive motions imaginable. Pretty much every pegging top I've run into frames it as a trust and vulnerability thing. A guy in an uncomfortable pose that needs you to make control the situation... needs you, that's not rocket science. A leash is a fulcrum, a blindfold is a way to drive focus.
There's a mismatch even when this comes up - just like the foot kink, these aren't mirrors of their sub variants and especially not of their male sub variants - but it's more subtle than the numbers alone.
You offer some degenerate forms of these motivations, and I recognize they exist and happen, but this is also... just kinda how relationships work?
I don't want to overstate that. Presumably someone on this planet has encountered a perfect mirror to their own desires and interests in every way. But for everyone else, a good relationship necessarily means growing to work with your partner, and making compromises to meet their needs, and spelling out compromises so they know how to meet yours.
There's a significant discrepancy in what gender prefers sex in the morning or evening. If you're in a het relationship you're more likely than not going to end up not matching on that. It's nothing that gets spelled out on online hookups, or tested by matchmakers, or shows up on people's bumper stickers, or in Seinfield. Often it's not even something that's an explicit discussion. It's just something that's gotta be handled.
Kink mismatches don't have to turn into something broken. The median form of #2 probably doesn't look like a big heart-to-heart conversation filled with therapy speak, but the boring 'hey, could we try X', 'doesn't tickle my pickle, but seeing what it does to you is kinda fun' is actually pretty enjoyable from the latter perspective, and while it doesn't necessarily turn into liking the kink on its own, for some people it can. The median form of #3 might not be 'real' domination in the same sense as someone that someone who had Feelings from the first time they saw a cartoon character tied to a railroad, but there's a lot of male subs for whom 'I order you to go down on me' is a not-that-briar-patch moment and it's a perfectly reasonable exchange for them.
That's not just or even primarily a sex thing. What's the Proper way to load a dishwasher? Because if you live with someone long enough, you'll pretty quickly find that there's a million ways to do it wrong. Does the responsibility for cleaning out the laundry lint trap fall on the person removing the clean clothes, or the one putting in dry ones? I'd never have tried FFXIV if my SO didn't get me into it and probably never would have liked it without that had anyone else tried; that doesn't make it bad. (The same SO also liked Alien: Prometheus, so we can definitely declare that Pavlov is definitely not mind-control here.)
Yeah, especially the central cases, will agree here. It's not the only motivation for kink, but it's definitely a major part and probably in the top three for femsubs (and I could believe it beats masochism-as-learnt-response and submission-as-permission-structure).
I'll quibble that most 'breeding' as a kink is more about primal and unprotected sex (to the point where 'no pregnant, only breed' is a snowclone). 'Free use' is typically more about sublimating the need for explicitly saying 'yes', but they're desperately afraid of that for traditionalist, status, and feminist reasons, too. There's a literal women-as-livestock version, but it's not particularly common.
((I think pregnancy kink and 'stuck' kink are probably overrepresented as a woman's extreme kink? But they're pretty far from top-ten as extreme women's kinks go.))
But my bigger objection is that I don't think it's fully about fear, or at least fear alone. There's a lot of people who have complicated feelings about motherhood and have a impregnation kink, but it seems like the overwhelming do need to have at least a complicated feeling on the matter; with fear and some other consideration, even if not a consideration you'd ever want to go with. If you just hate it, even the more fatalistic women just have backup plans.
Yeah, that's reasonable, and I agree. You don't get vore fantasies from a healthy perspective about what sex should be, or need to tie down your romantic partner to sate your anxiety from a centered and stable mindset, (or, to self-criticize like orientation play if you have a healthy relationship with your own identity). There's a lot of kinksters that are coming to kink from a fucked up place, or get there and find that they're among mad people now and have been for years.
I just don't think they're necessarily a self-abnegating or sexuality-abnegating fucked up place.
I actually would say that the signs of the growth of this genre don't come from fantasy-focused sites -- they come from traditionally-vanilla sites where these kinks are gaining significant ground. As more and more men are addicted to pornography, which inherently includes the experience of watching a different man have sex with a woman, there's a strong current of shame and self-contempt that I see growing in the water supply. Coupled with the increasing sex gap and loneliness crisis, what's happening is that increasingly men feel that the possibility of sex is above them, that women in particular are 'above' them, beautiful but untouchable, and this psychosexual viewpoint, combined with porn, is corrosive.
When I say "influencers" I mean something more like "onlyfans creators" and "pornstars"; a growing genre of pornography, even softcore, is "woman berates you on camera for your inability to have sex with women," which as a sign of the times is something along the lines of the rivers turning to blood. Onlyfans creators are starting to turn to this, because the demand is there, and guys who pay onlyfans creators for the 'privilege' of indistinguishable nudes seem to me to have a sense of profound sexual inferiority, which belittling and humiliating femdom can and does exploit. The problem is that shame is being eroticized and sold back to the ashamed for profit.
I don't doubt that these kinks make up only a small percentage of the active, long-lived, and well-practiced fantasy scripts in kink communities, but my concern is about the metastasis into vanilla or mainly-vanilla spaces, where I believe these kinks do real psychological damage and contribute to significant shame.
I'm not so vanilla as to be totally prudish, but I admit that reading this part made my skin crawl.
I guess reading about pure femdom gives me the same kind of heebie jeebies as when vanilla women read about maledom dynamics -- the whole thing just rhymes with "someone's being abused here, something bad is happening, get away from this as fast as you possibly can" in a way that strikes me pre-cognitively. I also don't know that I'd describe "I've cut you so you're mine, irrecoverably" as a not mentally ill cognition, but I guess at that point we're entering Szasz territory of debating what a mental illness is, and at the very least I simply believe that kind of thinking reveals a level of possessive that I can't pre-cognitively differentiate from predation. Your examples so alarmed my unconscious threat-detection system that I went into fight or flight.
I can understand this, and my point in the post was to assert that this is essentially what I think is the not-broken version of femdom. I suppose it's just a prior, or a psychological heuristic, for me that a woman who autonomously, on her own, developed the kink for domination is not the sort of person I would feel safe around. I also think #3 is much sadder than you're giving it credit -- it's not about "wanting oral sex and demanding it," but genuinely sad stuff, like a woman whose reddit post I once saw talked about how her husband calls her ugly and she was looking for "male submissives whose task it would be to praise me highly", which is all kinds of fucked up no matter where someone lands on kink.
In general, I find desires for domination to be deeply uncomfortable, and again I just can't differentiate them from predation. I can understand the masochism-pleasure-pain thing, and I can understand the "obedience as permission" thing, but what I find incredibly hard to understand is sadism. I hope I never understand it.
I do resent to an extent the fact that women I've dated have pushed me to accept those kinds of kinks, and it's a consistent thing for me that romantic, slow, intimate sex is what I enjoy and is memorable to me. Rough sex just doesn't even feel like sex to me, in a way that's hard to describe.
And I guess, to put it bluntly, "I enjoy the part of sex where I'm blindfolded and flogged," makes about as much sense to me as "I enjoy the part of the football game where the pitcher throws the ball at the batter" -- just seems like a category error.
That's fair, though in turn it's harder to get serious numbers. PornHub-Straight has a cuckold category, and it does beat VR porn... but it's a third the size transgender stuff, a fifth the size of public sex or squirting, and half the size as explicit watersports. And that still has a bunch of stuff that's not actually excluding the male sub from having sex with his wife, nevermind berating it.
It's also hard to separate popularity from prominence. I don't know much about the het side of OF, but last I looked one of the biggest personalities on the gay side was feederist kink. This is a weird, (literally and physically!) unhealthy redirection, to the extent I can understand it... and it's also incredibly rare as something people actually want, and afaict isn't something you can get trained into. It just naturally favors concentration, both because feedes are rare, and because the nature of the kink favors multiple feeders. That's still bad, but it's bad in the way Jackass is bad, rather than because it's trying to hypnotize people. If it weren't for the inevitable anorexia or bulimia, it'd just be dumb.
Unfortunately, I can't find even bad numbers on OF kink breakdowns, so I can't really speak to or against it in deeper detail.
That's fair. They are weird kinks, and I tried to pick ones that were weird in the specific way you're motioning around, rather than, say, omorashi.
Do these things strike you as wrong because of their motives, because of the degree of possessiveness, or because the actions don't fit your sexual register? Most women I've met into this sort of marking aren't especially possessive (for women, damning with faint praise as that might be by gay standards). Male impregnation kink (uh, straight or gay) can focus around the exact same 'we're together forever' now thing, as can just the 'fingernails down back' kink, or even people who get really worked up over giving hickies. Are couple's tattoos or piercings bad because they're Szasz-adjacent, or just because they're trash?
Those sort of situations exist, and they are sad, and there's a lot of variants on it. I just don't see the recovery as the sad bit, necessarily. The initial abuse is sad. Maladaptive coping mechanisms do happen, and they are bad as a tautology, and those are sad.
Getting off on a merely weird coping mechanism feels more... nonoptimal? Inefficient? Getting into relationships where 'value my appearance' or even 'don't call me ugly' is a sexual ritual rather than just room temperature is a limiting factor because a lot of guys will genuinely find that goofy, but it doesn't mean you can't also have it as the room temperature outside of the bedroom (or the scene), either. But the asshole ex-husband caused the damage; this is just the repair work.
If you have this coping mechanism, it's worth admitting and spelling it out, both to yourself and to potential partners. It is a limitation. Even small stuff can be enough of an ask, and some forms are a lot more invasive. That's true of a million things, though.
That comes into a difficult spot, because there are some useful notes to show ways domination can be different from predation, or how healthier (or at least more sub-friendly) forms of sadism look, if sometimes weird ones that are far away from what you see as sex (or far away from what is sex, thank you fucking machines), but I don't want to throw them out if they're going to be actively harmful for you.
I can empathize with the division: even as someone that likes subbing, it doesn't take much that doesn't fit the scene to break the mood, and I've experienced it. Dunno if it's as rough for me as for you, but it's definitely a difficult situation, and actually pushing back can be uncomfortable.
Not wanting a single drop of it's absolutely fair, and honest, and something you can and should draw a thick red line around. Just because someone has these kinks doesn't obligate you to try them out, and even if someone has these kinks for sympathetic reasons, that doesn't mean anyone has to try them out.
Thanks for the substantive engagement. I had to reflect on it.
I'm not the biggest fan of tattoos in the world, but I'll admit, a tasteful, discrete couples tattoo is up there with "Baptizatus sum" in terms of tattoos I could respect. I think it's a silly idea, because that's a dangerous thing to mark your body with given the possibility of divorce and it tempts fate, but you know, I don't totally hate it.
And on reflection, I actually don't think it's the possessiveness of it that makes this concerning to me. It's the bodily harm element. I suppose I have what the kinksters would call a 'hard limit' for bodily harm, weaponry, cutting. I also understand there's a big thing in the kink world where people get bruised up and it's a point of pride, and I find that hard to think about. I guess I understand a little redness on the butt if you're into spanking, but when hematomas get involved I'm extremely squicked. I have a slight impulse to use the "I think X is good, actually" meme here, and I guess I'll just say it: "I think people leaving the bedroom uninjured is good, actually."
I actually find possessiveness, when it's mutual, hot and one of the more fun aspects of a monogamous LTR. So the fact that that women into cutting men with knives aren't actually that posessive is actually a disappointment, in one sense, to me. And if they're not particularly possessive by the standards of women, that in a way contributes to my point: that to act this way towards a man creates distance between her and him, in a way that may make actual long-term committed love psychologically improbable.
I guess I'm very skeptical of most means of social control, and I have a bit of that libertarian "ThIs Is My LaNd!" energy in me, where I imagine myself in the place of someone being sexually dominated in the way you're describing, and the visceral reaction is "get the hell away from me." I control me.
So it's not possessiveness as much as it is control that I find uncomfortable; possessiveness in the mutual self-gift sense -- "I'm yours forever, you're mine forever" -- is the most romantic thing in the world. But when it gets to, "I have placed a locked device around your member so you do things for me" it just activates primal bodily defenses. Partly because it's just weird, and partly because it's not mutual.
What strikes me, I suppose, is that "we're together forever" is a good impulse for a couple to have, and it would be great if we had a major social institution that could ratify this formally so people don't have to rely on tattoos and piercings to accomplish it. We could keep the jewelry aspect. Maybe men in robes could officiate.
I guess what I'm saying is that, as a good socialcon, I have suspicions that maybe some elements of kink are post-sexual-revolution attempts to re-impose the compelling aspects of the tradition, and I worry it does so, but in a degraded form.
I'll cop to having had some fairly submissive fantasies from time to time, and if you
bound and gagged me andforced me to take the BDSMtest honestly at gunpoint, I think you'd see me ending up on that edge of the spectrum pretty decisively. If this is what you've been suspecting all along, congratulations, I'll give you one Stanley Nickel.But I think what alarms me in reading your comment is how... alien, and potentially dangerous the 'dominant side' of these kinks are. As I said before, I flat out don't understand sadism as psychology, and I have a serious ethical worry that building out the neurological pathways associated with it, even as part of sex and role play, is a change in the person that leads to vice, not virtue. I just have no desire to 'control' people in the way you've described, and I guess I would find it fantastically hard to trust someone who expressed that sadism or that kind of intense control formed a part of their psychological makeup.
Moreover, I just have significant doubts that femdom/maledom dynamics can coexist with heterosexual love as I understand it. I just have a strong prior that small elements of disrespect in a relationship, which are behaviorally indistinguishable from some elements of femdom, will eventually bubble into large-scale conflicts and profound disrespect that will destroy the relationship. The kinkster claim is that the underlying psychology is different, even as the behavior looks the same, but that's what any apologist says about something that looks bad, and the internal psychological state of dominant women is invisible to me and it would take a very large mountain of evidence to prove it to my satisfaction.
It should be noted that our conversation here is taking place as part of a thread based on a comment that argues some elements of maledom BDSM are compelling to women because of a widespread female desire to submit to men in broad contexts. This is obviously the subject of intense and impassioned debate, but what is hard for me to deny is that maledom dynamics, at the very least, follow the gradient of standard heterosexuality in a way femdom doesn't.
A corrolary of this is that, to follow femdom dynamics where they lead, you must work against this gradient, and I have serious concerns that doing this would also work against the normal psychological gradients that keep men and women together.
I do my best to resist the blackpill, but there are elements of the blackpill I find at least somewhat plausible, and the risk of the blackpill being true indicates to me that the risk of these dynamics to heterosexuality is potentially ruinous. To use the language of the blackpill: saying that these dynamics don't utterly ruin and destroy heterosexuality is to say that women stick with betas, and in particular stick with them while holding them to be the primary object of their sexual interest. I'm just not convinced that it's possible for a woman to 'look down on' or 'control' a man sexually, while still loving him.
To belabor the metaphor, it's a hard pill to swallow, intellectually speaking. It's a nice thought, but I hold whatever fantasies I may have internally, because I just don't see a good argument for how they'd ever be treated with respect or understanding or desire. I'd like to think differently, but I don't know how I could.
I guess it's, again, my socialcon self showing up here, but I'm not sure my first description of it would be "a merely weird nonoptimal coping mechanism." I think what's being asked for is simply love, in its true form, and it's my opinion that making this a 'sexual ritual' -- or more particularly to what's going on, a ritual of control -- is a healthy response. But I also have a configuration of morals such that I hold even people in pain to an incredibly high standard of conduct.
And, as a hopeless romantic, I do have to admit I find it hard not to see a romance-shaped hole in every human heart, and configurations of intimacy that lack this, or seem to approximate it without fully reaching it, strike me as strictly worse than nothing at all. But this requires a pretty demanding set of metaphysics and morals to uphold, and I don't necessarily expect that people will find this persuasive even if I do.
Ah -- I think something got lost in translation here. What I mean is that I actually have felt pushed into being a 'dominant' partner with women before, and haven't liked it. Even if she enjoyed it a lot and demanded I do it more, I really didn't enjoy the part where her nipples ended up bruised or the nasty degrading names she wanted me to call her. It just doesn't feel right to me. Again, I like the version of sex where everybody walks away uninjured. I realize that puts me in a minority.
I admit that female sexuality includes a lot of these features, and I don't love it, really, but I've accepted that to get the companionship and intimacy that I want I have to pretend I enjoy domming from time to time.
No woman has ever offered to dominate me in any sense, and I don't know what I'd do if the offer were made.
I've experienced being on the receiving end of someone's dominant fantasy, in fantasy solely, but it wasn't a woman who did that, and I was alarmed enough by what they were saying that I got the hell away from them as quickly as possible. It hot for a bit, but I knew very quickly this person Meant Trouble.
I suppose the overall texture of my feelings about the kink community is that I just don't experience sex as an avenue of 'play' and identity shifting in the way they do -- as far as I'm concerned, sex is the most identity-relevant and immediate experience you can have, and it's been my experience that trying to shift it away from that identity and immediacy cheapens it, makes it less compelling.
I also find it very hard to participate in role-play and identity shfting in non-sexual contexts, and things like acting, ass-kissing, dishonesty, going along to get along, play pretend are all very difficult for me. I experience the world very immediately and very, perhaps the word is authentically? and I find it hard to put on airs. I just kind of am what I am. So perhaps I just have the wrong psychological configuration to find any of this comprehensible, except insofar as I've stated.
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Absolutely incomprehensible take.
I know I’m worthy of my wife. Seeing her in control is still inherently validating and sexy, for the same reasons as most any show of enthusiasm. Being desirable is good! I’m not talking about extreme BDSM here, just mild to moderate femdom.
No shit. You don’t need a maximally-cynical model predicting abuse and assault to think “hey, I’m supposed to play hard to get, but what if I could still get railed in the process?”
Now apply this reasoning to men, who have the same post-Victorian, post-Puritan culture in the back of our minds. The tradeoff between desirability and availability applied to rakes and bachelors, too. Consider whether we might also derive some benefit from playing with that dynamic, from allowing our partners to express the desire and longing which we know they feel.
If you think of yourself as a basically obligate "straight male sub", which is the kind of person urquan was talking about, then a) telling on yourself, b) you're sufficiently outlier enough not to have a clear view on the topic at all. I get the impression that's not the case and you're just talking about it being hot when your wife is sexually aggressive, which is not at all the same thing as was being discussed in the parent post.
This... get complicated, and I don't think "obligate straight male sub" is a sufficiently precise category. Some central and common parts of that category, both by self-identity and popular culture, include:
I think urquan's motioning toward stuff like cuckolding, extreme chastity play, and redirections 'away' from actual sex. But while cuckolding exists, even there, a lot of stuff you or I would call cuckolding doesn't slide into the same psychological space. The broader other-men-fucking-your-wife-fandom includes:
That doesn't necessarily make them healthy or any less indica of psychosexual weirdness. Some of the simple boring stuff can be a sign of unmanaged anxiety: some bondage subs are all about not being able to make a 'wrong' move, or being forced to make one of two wrong moves and being rewarded for it in predicament bondage. Being 'ordered' is a really convenient way to disclaim responsibility for noticing your partner's interests, and no small number of subs do actively abuse it. While some of the 'oh don't make me clean off my wife's partner's dick' people are in it for orientation play or humiliation there's definitely some self-closeted-in-unhealthy ways going on.
Even where it's just sensation-focus, there's probably something behind it, in the sense that normal people don't like getting zapped or forced to hold their bladder or shoved into a frilly skirt. Some of them are just outright worse than just hating their sexuality: I'll point to findom, again, as something that's handling a normal desire ('show I value this person I'm having sex with') in an exceptionally unhealthy way even when the actual expression is just 'oh love of my life let me show you how much I like your pussy'.
But it does make them hard to fit into "if your schema of the world tells you that you're unlovable and unfuckable, sexually worthless". Even a lot of redirection of sex or chastity or cuckolding that eliminates the sub's ability to fuck is more about the prohibition than sub's self-perception or external valuation.
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Scattered thoughts:
Oh no, I fully believe I'm worthy to fulfill them. But that statement also disqualifies me from being a sub. Rather than the "I may not be able to please a woman, but I can watch and faciliate as she is pleased by another man" sense, it's the power to know that happening doesn't actually matter, not the pain of knowing that it does (re: the chad 'swinger' vs. the virgin 'cuckold'). Which is why allowing the realization to happen (on either side) destroys relationships if provoked.
Or the "or you want the release of anxiety from having fucked up and being ‘free’ of that" dynamic is in effect on the male side, but that's just the "had a bad day at work so the woman initiates even though he's not on it today" kind of femdom. Not necessarily a central example of such though.
gold_digger.jpg, and what I describe at the very bottom is part of why people get really mad at [minimum, the appearance of] this
You do have to be careful when doing this; thinking with your dick here leads to trouble. But that's just more being able to gauge people accurately/keeping a clear head in the discovery process between who is and isn't suitable to have a relationship like that with than anything else, something malesubs might not even be able to pull off given the lack of femdoms (or may "settle" for someone driven more by a quest for D/s than is healthy for either participant).
I tend to do this but that's more a question of seeking people to grow with, so it's not really as one-sided as it otherwise seems, but there's always that risk and I'm probably doing it wrong anyway. Or maybe it's just an unacknowledged mental problem on my end.
Yeah, but of course they're going to call it that given the room temperature is what I describe at the bottom. This is kind of just what healthy relationships are supposed to look like.
It occurs to me that a command of "you shall not lay with a man as you would a woman" may not technically be limited to men.
The people who invented this believe 2 things:
Which maps 1:1 onto the liberal critique of socialists, mainly because both are true. Which is why people who believe this claim so loudly that it isn't true, and that bleeds into the claim that it's deontologically wrong to see sex as labor. They make those claims of "don't be a slut" and "being sexually available is sinful" because it literally devalues sex to do that, which affects those at the bottom of the market worst of all.
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I would say "Big Yud in shambles", but he apparently has no short supply of "math pets".
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There's a substack article by (sorry!) Aella in which she groups people into tendersexuals and
bdsmexualspowersexuals. Sorry, her name for it is stupid. Of course, it's a spectrum, but the idea is solid: some people like their sex romantic, some people like their sex with a clearly established power imbalance.Which is not exactly a novel proposition, but there's another tidbit that I think is important. She has a hypothesis (supported by her massive survey, IIRC) that the share of powersexual women is larger than that of men. There are simply not enough pretty boys willing to choke the girl they love. Or rather, they are unwilling to do this because they find the practice off-putting and would prefer to cuddle instead.
I'm going to call biased sample on this for any survey run by Aella. Given that she, ultimately, deals in selling straight sex to men, presumably the male portion of her social neighbourhood looks very different from the female one. (...and there is an obvious confounder story explaining a bias in exactly that direction: any female followers are less likely to follow for who she is and so more likely to follow for what she does, a lot of which involves BDSM)
Independently, I've previously observed that BDSM seems to be a very sticky meme, insofar as people who get into it start projecting its dynamics onto everything. I have even seen interactions like: BDSM-brained person hooks up with normal person thinking this person must be a "dom", finding the person insufficiently dominant, and getting fixated on the idea that the target's former partner must therefore actually be a secret "S type".
If I remember correctly, the bulk of replies has come from unrelated communities in which the link was shared. Which doesn't mean it's completely unbiased, but it's not "10000 simps" or "100 college students from the two classes I taught that year", like many other surveys are.
Right, I do take that into account. I think the bias will significantly persist through any communities that link will be reshared in. I couldn't imagine even telling about Aella to any women I know, apart from my SO (who I talk to about all forms of LW degeneracy anyway), let alone trying to get them interested in a poll of hers.
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As a multi-decade BJJ practitioner I feel like the choking thing is a bit overblown, though I would suspect if people are doing open hand trachea chokes there's way more risk of things going awry than there is with most other recreational oxygen deprivation.
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Is it? I've always thought it was one of those things complaints about which are overrepresented on Reddit and Bluesky.
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The answer apparently is, as with so many niche practices that got normalised into the mainstream, porn. Young guys watch porn, see the actress being choked and loving it, think that's what girls want in bed. Girls get asked (or not even asked) by their boyfriends to let them choke them, agree because he'll leave me if I don't keep him happy in bed and besides all the guys are asking for it/I see it in porn so this must be normal and I'm a repressed prude if I refuse.
Some people genuinely do want to indulge in breathplay, but yeah you need to know what the hell you're doing or else there is real risk.
That may be true for many other fetishes but I've literally never heard any guy express a desire for that kind of play. Every time you hear about it, it's always the girl pushing for it. I think society finds this awkward so it gets blamed on the men.
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My experience is the reverse (she asked for it first), although we stopped after concerns about cognitive impact in the long term.
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Yeah that flow of events is backwards IME. Every girl I've done that with has been the first to request it. Some of them were extremely insistent. The funny thing is they were doing the "it's normal, everyone does it" routine on me.
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FWIW, men commonly report that women are the ones who asked them to try it. We tend to be a bit more focused on, uh, other things.
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I don’t really choke my wife. I just put my hand on her throat. It gets her off.
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I’m not sure it’s a spectrum as opposed to two separate axes? You can have sex that’s steeped in power dynamics and extremely romantic, or get choked and then cuddle after.
This can very well be true but doesn't change the underlying idea: the number of men that are willing to incorporate power dynamics into their relationship is insufficient, even before we take social conditioning into account. Well, and not all women are into that.
But trad marriages are all about power dynamics, and they were the norm at one point.
Are they? There's a difference between knowing your place in the hierarchy that spans the known universe and spanking your wife with your free hand as you rail her from behind using her hair as reins to help her (or yourself) climax.
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I'm unclear to what degree it's PR and to what degree it's willful blindness. BDSM is obviously connected to some dark human impulses but people online seem incredibly desperate to deny it.
I'm actually not sure what to make of humanity's dark impulses in the sexual realm, especially when they get tied up in weird fetish stuff beyond BDSM.
For example, there's an entire niche erotica category of downgrade transformation fetishes. It's people getting turned on by the idea of someone magically transforming into a lesser version of themselves. Popular cheerleader to shy nerd, fitness trainer to fat slob, that sort of thing. It's dark, but it is also goofy because it can never happen in real life.
Psychologically, I think it mirrors a lot of what is happening with BDSM, at least as far as D/s dynamics go. A person's relative status is being lowered, so that other people's relative status is increased.
However, I'm not even sure why we have these kinds of kinks and fetishes from an evopsych perspective. Like, I kind of get the idea of the monkey brain fantasizing about seeing someone getting taken down a peg, but how did magical transformations become a part of it? Is this just where the idea of cursing someone comes from? How many Greek curse tablets were secretly someone acting out a psychosexual fetish of theirs?
Perhaps it is just one of those happy accidents with profound downstream effects, like human's love of gold.
I have no idea how it comes about, but I can say that as a boy I had conceived of very weird kinks despite not even having reached puberty and never having been involved in sexual activity. Puberty was less of a sexual awakening for me and much more of an "oh shit, I can ejaculate now, what is this crap?" moment.
Wherever kink comes from, my personal experience suggests to me that it has to be deep, deep down.
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I think a quick review of the Facebook profiles of acquaintances from 10 years ago tends to beg to differ on this one.
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