preservation of Lithium Picnic

(originally published June 18, 2011.)



It strikes me that for all the fetish photography that shows women being tied to things, the really extreme bondage-gear set-ups--like this one--just don't work with harmless girls.

You chain the pretty ones, you bind the pretty ones, sure--tie them to trunks, beds, furniture, walls, floors, each other...and we all know, that's kind of the point.

But get-ups like this suggest something else entirely. This, you do to dangerous girls, girls that bite, girls that scratch, girls that will fight back. You immobilize the ones who strike out. You gag the ones that know the crushing strength of their own jaws.

Willing, not willing, these are abstract concepts at this point. If there's no fight in her eyes, she'll look like a doll. And this woman is not a doll.

Photographer: Lithium Picnic. Model: Apnea. All Rights Reserved, ©2006-2019 Lithium Picnic.

preservation of intelligent kink

(originally published May 2, 2011.)

"It’s worth noting that claiming that there’s something broken in submissives — or in submissive men — amounts to an argument for etiology, yet there’s no consensus on why we have the kinks we do in the BDSM community, and no answer at all from the research, what little there is. There’s a plain inconsistency between sometimes very smart and well-informed people knowing and saying that there’s no available answer to why we do what it is that we do, and then saying (usually among our own) that we know why subs are subs.

"This gets personal for me. I can’t tell you why I have the kinks I do, but I can tell you what I get out of bottoming. The challenge, the difficulty, the trust, the violation of gender and social norms with a partner, all amount to one thing: a site of tremendous intimacy, a shared physical end emotional journey where I am vulnerable to and connected with my partner...like jumping off a cliff. So that’s my answer.

"What these prejudices amount to is a normalizing and centering of the experience of the dominant in The Scene. One way this is apparent is by the overrepresentation of tops or dominants among presenters. Presentations tend to be about skills, often bondage and painplay skills, and there’s a perception that it’s easier for the top to teach these skills. I don’t entirely agree with that perception, but between the overrepresentation of men among tops in The Scene, and the tendency for tops to do the teaching, that means that male tops to most of the talking. As one of Weiss’s informants put it: “[Janus is a] het male dom group. Every single presentation I’ve ever been to, every class I’ve ever taken...across the board, het dom male.” (Weiss at p. 241 n. 14.)

"Maymay tells a story about presenting with a partner somewhere: he’s a bottom, and his partner started out by singletailing his back. And then the audience expected her to stop and start explaining what she had shown. But instead, Maymay, the bottom, started explaining what she was doing, as a top, and what he was doing, as a bottom. It’s a paired activity. It makes perfect sense that the bottom can explain skills for a paired activity. Topping a singletail scene means knowing something about both how to top it and what to expect from the bottom, and vice versa, but the ingrained expectation that tops teach skills was so great that the audience kept looking at the top, expecting her to take over."
~Domism: Role Essentialism and Sexism Intersectionality in the BDSM Scene, via maymay

preservation of the untouchable femme

(originally published March 21, 2011.)

originally seen on (maymay)

"I do want to turn power roles on their heads but, perhaps unexpectedly enough, I don’t believe that the outward performance of female sexual dominance will have much effect in that regard. Perhaps the only reason that I do not merely reiterate the idea of a female supremacist state governed by spike-heeled, latex-clad, Wanda von Dunajew clones is that I’m not primarily dominant, and therefore couldn’t be Queen of such a state. But more than that, I think even such a proposal, while it seems to be the most radically opposite thing possible from anti-sex feminism, is in fact propagating the exact same problematic anti-sex and anti-femininity ideas as those it seeks to oppose. While I greatly admire and at times practice female sexual dominance, in terms of sexual politics I think it is far less useful for female empowerment than it would appear to be, sort of in the way that the SAT answer choice that seems totally obvious and easy is usually wrong.

"This is because intractably submissive men are actually often the biggest misogynists around: their worship of dominant women is the only way they can indulge deviant sexual desires while keeping their virgin/whore complexes intact. The dominant woman and the puritan virgin are in fact quite similar. They are both impenetrable fortresses of untouchable femininity; the woman-as-what-you-can’t-ever-have. The danger of actuality, of real possession, of the sex act and what follows in all its sticky complexities—which we never resolve because it’s no part of the stories of pursuit and courtship on which men and women alike are raised; stories that end with a fade-to-black on the way to the bedroom—is conveniently never reached, and the man can remain in a safe, comfortable state of unfulfilled torment."
~ (via Kinky Sex for Social Justice « Femalearrogance’s Blog (post not found at this point)

^&^

I'm not entirely sure I agree with this, but I didn’t feel I could just 'heart' it and move on...It's a challenging statement, and one that I do not entirely agree with, but I can’t say that in my dominant days I didn’t meet men who enshrined me utterly--until it looked like they could have me. Then they tried either the cage or the rebuff, or both, which never worked.

So there are definite points to ponder here.