Not Going There
I’m not sure what made me start thinking of it. I was thinking about stuff I’ve read about very intense, very un-PC kinky role-playing scenes. Jewish people doing Nazi scenes; African-Americans doing slave-owner/ slave scenes; that sort of thing.
And I was realizing: I don’t know if I could go there.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with playing that way. I can see why people would want to play that way. I support, not only people’s right to play that way, but people’s right to play that way without being scorned by the SM community.
I just don’t think I could go there. Not just as a bottom — as a top, too. As a top maybe even more.
Even if my partner were into it. Even if they were the one suggesting it. Even if they were completely enthusiastic about it and wanted it more than anything. I don’t think I could do it.
Here’s the thing. When I do any kind of role-playing, in order for it to work I have to find the grain of truth in it. I have to find the part of the role — whether it’s top or bottom — that overlaps with a part of who I am.
Sometimes that’s fairly easy. I can easily find the part of me that’s a selfish, controlling perfectionist who wants exactly what she wants exactly the way she wants it. It’s a bit unsettling, actually, how easy it is to find that. And I can find the part of me that’s helpless and malleable and wants someone else to make all the decisions. Again, a little disturbing how easy that is to find, but there it is. I can find the part of me that feels powerful when I hurt someone, the part that’s hungry to be the center of attention, the part that feels like suffering is proof of devotion.
And I’m happy to let those parts of me come out and play.
But there are some roles that I either don’t have in me — or that I don’t want to tap into if I do. I don’t want to find my inner Nazi, or my inner slave-owner. If I have one, I don’t want to get to know it. I don’t want to make friends with it. And I really don’t want to get off on it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people who do, any more than I think there’s anything wrong with me for getting off on my inner martyred doormat or my inner sadistic bitch. I just don’t want to go there.
And it suddenly occurred to me:
Oh.
I bet this is how men who don’t want to spank women feel.
I see a lot of letters in sex advice columns from men saying, “My girlfriend/ wife wants me to spank her but I don’t want to, she keeps saying it’s okay and she wants it but I don’t want to hurt her.” Or from women saying, “My boyfriend/ husband doesn’t want to spank me, I keep telling him it’s okay and I want it but he just says he doesn’t want to hurt me.” And until now, my attitude towards these men has been a somewhat dismissive, “Will you just spank her already? She says she wants it. It’s okay to do it if she wants it. And it’s not that fucking big of a deal. Will you get over the willies already and just smack the poor girl’s bottom?”
But when I started thinking about all the places in my head that I don’t want to go, I suddenly got a lot more sympathetic. I bet that for a lot of these guys, it’s not just about, “I’m afraid I’ll hurt her.” I bet for a lot of them it’s about, “I don’t want to hurt her.” Or more precisely, “I don’t want to want to hurt her.”
In other words, I bet you that some of these guys just don’t want to go there. They don’t want to find the part of themselves that gets off on hurting women. They don’t want to find the part of themselves that gets off on controlling women, or punishing them, or asserting power over them, or causing them physical pain.
Which I get. Finding those parts of yourself can be weird and hard. And I think it’s especially hard when the power dynamics being played out in the bedroom are a direct reflection of the ones being played out in real life. After all, I’m a lot more comfortable playing, say, “serving wench” than I would be playing a scene with racist content. I work too hard to combat the racist parts of me to have any fun at all letting them out to play. And I could see how men who work hard to be feminist might feel the same way about spanking the women they love.
Now, I do think spanking is on a very different scale from Nazi or slave-owner scenes. Maybe it’s just because it’s become so common, mainstream almost; but I don’t see it as having quite the same kind of gravitas or emotional hair-trigger. And therefore I do think that, if you want to be what Dan Savage calls “good, giving, and game,” you should at least seriously consider getting over your qualms about spanking if your sweetie really wants to do it, and at least give it a try.
I’m just saying that tops have just as much right to have squicks and limits as bottoms do. Including having a squick or a limit about being a top at all. And I’m saying that, if I want my unwillingness to go there with a Nazi or a slave-owner scene to be respected, then ultimately I have to respect a straight guy’s unwillingness to go there
This entry was posted on Thursday, 19 July 2007 at 10:54 am and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Thursday, 19 July 2007 at 1:06 pm JenLovesPonies wrote:
This is very insightful. I have to say, while I have always thought that these nazi-slave-stuff like that was not something I want to do, I never really thought about the why of that. And to relate it back to nervous men- brilliant. I too read those questions and dismiss them as wimps, afraid to spank, but I suppose it could be scary to tap into that part of your brain, especially since men are trained to be as rough as they want with men, but they “can never hit a lady” or however boys are raised.
on Thursday, 19 July 2007 at 2:50 pm WildChyld wrote:
I’ve found that for some unpc role playing acts as a rewriting & reclaiming of roles. Playing with power can be very intense, especially for people who have felt powerless in the past (which is most of us!) One of the things that I’ve noticed is that many Dominant men who enjoy spanking women feel very much in tune with the feminist identity. They value consent, choice, rules, the ability to say i want it nor or stop as the need arises. Many people, playing consensually with these sorts of things feel a deep release or sense of control over things that in the real world would feel intensely disenfranchising.
There was a study published a few years back that looked at power exchange play with sexual abuse survivors. While for some, it trigger bad memories, for others it allows them to reclaim parts of their sexuality with someone whom they trust.
on Friday, 20 July 2007 at 1:50 pm C4bl3Fl4m3 wrote:
This reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my friends when I was visiting him in Seattle. We’re ex-lovers and still very close friends. We’re known to have hours long conversations… like 5 hours long, that will follow us where ever we go and will naturally go off on tangents and sometimes come back to the initial conversation and sometimes won’t. Because I rarely get to see him anymore because he lives in Seattle now, we hardly ever get to talk like that anymore, but when we do, we really have LONG conversations.
Anyway, we were talking about kink and BDSM as we do sometimes. And we were having one of those conversations that is so… intense isn’t exactly the word… memorable? yeah… anyway, it was so memorable that what I was seeing at the time is burned into my memory. It was late at night and we were taking the bus back from Seattle back to the Redmond/Bellevue area where he lives and I can remember seeing the bus stop in the dark and looking at where the mountains are when we crossed the highway and crossing the street and it being so dark and so black in the sky beyond the yellow of the sodium lights. Anyway.
I think we were talking about touchy scenes like African Americans doing or wanting to do slave/master scenes. I was explaining the nuances of it… how some won’t do it, how some want to do it to reclaim power, how some black people want to be the bottom in it but can’t find a white top that will do it with them, etc. I got quiet for a moment, thinking. I asked him “I’m just curious… and you don’t have to answer this, and I really don’t want to offend you, and there’s no such thing as a wrong answer… but do you think you could ever do a Nazi scene?” Now he’s Jewish, but all of his family moved to America in the early 1900’s, so he doesn’t have quite the personal history with the Holocaust that some of my other Jewish friends do. He thought about it for a moment and said quite simply and plainly with no horror or panic or fear in his voice, just in this calm and thoughtful manner, “no, I don’t think I could”.
I don’t know if I could, either. I have too many Jewish friends and Judaism is part of my spiritual path. Also, I’ve thought about “what would have happened to me if I was in Germany, etc. at that time”. I’m “Aryan” enough that that part of it wouldn’t have made a difference, but I probably would have gotten in trouble for political dissent, for my disability (ADHD), and for being bisexual (I probably wouldn’t have realized that at the time, though) and using birth control.
However, there is this tiny little part of me that’s tittilated by the thought of a scene like that. But it probably is titilliation at the strictness and the regimented style. Everything’s clean and neat, morality is black and white and I have a part of me that craves that desperately. (I had it growing up with Catholicism and it was very hard for me to let go of it.)
I thought you brought up interesting ideas about the whole spanking thing, but I don’t understand why those men have to try to get over it while you don’t expect yourself to try to get over it. Yes, Nazi play is much stronger and deeper taboo than spanking, but maybe for them, the domination and subjugation of and brutality towards women is a very strong and deep thing to them. Maybe it’s as horrifying for them to do that as it would be for you to don a swastika laden outfit or to have to wear a black triangle. I’m not saying you should do Nazi play, I’m just trying to see how it’s REALLY that different. Feelings are feelings to people… some are stronger than others. People have different triggers and who are we to decide where someone else’s limits should be? (Personally, for me, being spanked is almost a hard limit for me. In fact, for most people I might be playing with, it IS a hard limit. Rarely will I asked to be spanked, and then I have to be in complete control of how many spankings, where, how hard the spanking is, etc. It’s a hard limit because I was spanked as a child and found it utterly painful and humiliating in the most horrible and scarring way. [I’m particularly susceptible to humiliation.] Most people think that when I tell them I’m into kink that it means I like spankings… but I don’t, and I hate it when a random person would spank me on the ass playfully but with a bit of pain in passing or something. So, yeah, everyone has different triggers.)
I think another issue here that wasn’t addressed is: WHO are you doing this to? For the men that you described, you said it was their wives or girlfriends. It might be extremely hard for them to hurt them not so much because they’re women, but because it’s the person they LOVE. If it was any other woman asking them, they might be a bit more comfortable with it, but because it’s the person they care about, and because they might have been taught when they were young to be “gentlemen” and to “treat ladies with respect”, it might be extremely hard for them.
on Friday, 20 July 2007 at 6:09 pm nina wrote:
Great piece, Greta! It is of a piece, actually, from spanking to Nazi scenes. If you think of “kink” as a continuum, with, say, spanking at the low end and Facist role playing at the high end, every kinky person has a place on that continuum that works for them and one “click” over stops working for them.
As for me, I try to make friends with all the parts in me, even the sadistic evil bitch (harder for me to tap in to than other parts of me), or the slave owner. Why? Because I don’t want any part of myself to be hidden from me. I’m Jewish, and Nazi scenes, per se, don’t do much, but I do like military scenarios, complete with visored hats and Dhener boots. My sweetie knew two Jewish lesbians who would play in full Nazi regalia and, when questioned about it, said, “What would piss Hitler off more than what we do? We’re Jewish and we’re gay and we’re alive. Fuck him.” I liked that attitude, though I still won’t wear a swastika.
The same goes for interracial mistress/slave scenarios. My family has been fighting racial injustice in this country since the Scotsboro Boys case. My grandfather, an Alabama Jew, almost lost his life from being beaten for being a “Jewish, pinko, n-lover,” so this is also a topic that hits close to home. Then I was in a scene with a black couple and it had been established that he was both dominant and a mosochist (LOTS of tats on him already). So there he was, fucking her brains out in the missionary position and I hesitated to flog his back. My mind was saying, “What the fuck are you doing? You’re about to beat a black man!” Then I got over myself. He had expressed a clear interest in it and, from the first strike, it turned into one of the five hottest play moments of my life. I beat him in time to the music that was playng and it was hot and sweet. He was thrilled and thanked me for one of the best orgasms he’d had in a while.
But I really liked your empathy with the men who don’t want to spank their partners. Tops have the right of refusal, too, and they do get to say “no” to things that skeeve them out, something that bottoms don’t often seem to understand.
on Thursday, 26 July 2007 at 7:32 am roddy wrote:
I dont know about this but it sounds interesting;I recently started dragging girls to the bed by their hair and was surprised to find this makes em really hot.Perhaps I should demand their “papers’,find something amiss and begin some serious humiliation/interrogation (?)