This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, and based on women’s porn preferences, we have solid scientific studies backing up that claim.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
It's possible the thought-space is wider than I'm saying, but at the very least I'm insistent that there's a massive population that thinks along the lines that I outlined, this population is growing, it's not representative of roleplay or 'fun', the internet is spreading it and the 'influencers' in this space are deliberately inflaming it, and it does involve, to a great degree, the feeling of sexual worthlessness sublimated into submission.
It's likely that this is largely a product of our time, combined with the extremism-producing energy of the internet, but at this point I would bet that the median male with an interest in these kinks has the kind of mindset I'm presenting.
I can't speak to the physical kinks, and I find masochism bizzare, although I will stand on the statement that someone who wants to be physically hurt during sex has something odd going on with their self-concept.
I'll also insist that femdom/malesub is, indeed, discontinuous with normal heterosexuality in a way that light maledom dynamics aren't. This is essentially a fragment of the physical differences between men and women: men can penetrate, women have to use toys to do that, and so we've already crossed the line from fundamental heterosexuality into something artificial when we talk about pegging.
Men are also stronger than women, and the idea of a woman physically hurting or restraining a man is fairly silly, which means that any sadomasochism in femdom dynamics is an artificial inversion created by extremely deliberate fantasy. It's a man-bites-dog story.
That means that femdom dynamics are generally highly psychological, relating to a woman sort of 'having a man around her finger' kind of energy, which is indeed a heterosexual dynamic in relationships -- but very much not what women imagine for the bedroom, unless they're in the categories I outlined above. Even the #bossbitch who dominates in the boardroom wants to be dominated (or at least ravished) in the bedroom. Most of your proposed male sub kinks speak to that -- even the woman training the man with a clicker, or whatever, subsequently gets ravished. To correctly obey a woman's sexual desires is to dominate in the bedroom.
So to be into specifically sexual malesub dynamics with women speaks, in my eyes, to a dynamic in which a man seeks out from women something that you don't get from women, which is either sad, mistaken, or demonstrative of deep psychological damage.
This is very much a different phenomenon than "my wife is aggressive during sex," which isn't femdom, it's just hot.
This is certainly a real thing that's meaningfully different than what I outlined, and the 'hotwifing' thing is certainly its own thing, although the overlap is real.
But of course I was talking about extreme femdom/malesub dynamics, and insofar as stag and vixen and hotwifing and partner-swapping and open-relationships are not that, or even are maledom dynamics, it's not what I'm discussing.
I'm not actually convinced of this, although I suppose it exists in some numbers. Although the direction these kinds of kinks are going, in the echo chambers of the internet, is very much towards meeting the demand for "unlovable, unfuckable, sexually worthless" content.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would say "Big Yud in shambles", but he apparently has no short supply of "math pets".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's a pretty good thing that is the case. Most of BDSM is fine. Spank, use whips all you want but choking is legitimately dangerous and can cause permanent brain damage.
I don't understand out of all the fetishes, how is this one so normalised.
https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s275
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.
More options
Context Copy link
Is it? I've always thought it was one of those things complaints about which are overrepresented on Reddit and Bluesky.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
My experience is the reverse (she asked for it first), although we stopped after concerns about cognitive impact in the long term.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t really choke my wife. I just put my hand on her throat. It gets her off.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Same, I knew my kinks before I even understood how sex happened, without having seen anything even vaguely pornographic at all, without any internet access. It was incredibly natural.
For better or worse, i feel like humans have a bias for believing that their environment shapes them far more than it actually does.
Of course, having rich parents getting nutrition etc does significantly affect your life but I think personality and mental traits are less affected by environment (provided it's an typical environment and not an extreme case). Maybe how they are expressed is affected by environment.
It's not entirely genetics, it might be stochastic random process of how neurons happened to develop in someone's brain.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think a quick review of the Facebook profiles of acquaintances from 10 years ago tends to beg to differ on this one.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link