xochitl wrote:This is what she said here:
" . . . I also think that sexual taste is as wide ranging and varied as the human race and that, free of any kind of socialisation, it is likely that I would still like certain things which I have seen labelled 'inherently harmful'. Yeah, I can't know for sure, but having engaged in things in the past that I now know were due to issues I had, linked to growing up in patriarchy, I think I can tell the difference between what I enjoy and what I was warped into engaging in. "
I disagree with that... I definitely agree with Lost Clown when she says that "BDSM is rooted in patriarchal socialisation."
I agree with Laurelin when she says that "I have never understood is the argument that BDSM is not 'harmful'. Inflicting pain on someone is the definition of harm! That's the whole damn point!... The consent thing bugs me too, as it seems to deny personal responsibility for one's harmful actions. The action that one has done is the same whether the person 'consented' or not- why chose to harm? [...] I'm disagreeing with the logic that claims that if one harms another with that person's consent, that somehow makes not harmful."
Here is an Andrea Dworkin quote that made me take a definitive stance against BDSM:
As women, nonviolence must begin for us in the refusal to be violated, in the refusal to be victimized. We must find alternatives to submission, because our submission -- to rape, to assault, to domestic servitude, to abuse or victimization of every sort -- perpetuates violence.
The refusal to be a victim does not originate in any act of resistance as male-derived as killing. The refusal of which I speak is a revolutionary refusal to be a victim, any time, any place, for friend or foe. This refusal requires the conscientious unlearning of all the forms of masochistic submission which are taught to us as the very content of womanhood. Male aggression feeds on female masochism as vultures feed on carrion. Our nonviolent project is to find the social, sexual, political, and cultural forms which repudiate our programmed submissive behaviors, so that male aggression can find no dead flesh on which to feast.
When I say that we must establish values which originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what nonviolence is. Those notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold those notions have never renounced the male behaviors, privileges, values, and conceits which are in and of themselves acts of violence against us.
We will diminish violence by refusing to be violated. We will repudiate the whole patriarchal system, with its sado-masochistic institutions, with its social scenarios of dominance and submission all based on the male-over-female model, when we refuse conscientiously, rigorously, and absolutely to be the soil in which male aggression, pride, and arrogance can grow like wild weeds.
-- Andrea Dworkin, in "Redefining Nonviolence",
Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (p. 72) [Underlining in the above text is mine].
Now, I'd like to let you know that this Dworkin quote above (along with another one from "The Root Cause" which I cited in an earlier post in this thread) has made me take a resolute stance against such things as BDSM! Radical feminism is about
rejecting patriarchy and all its misogynistic social conditionings. That is why I personally believe that we, as women and as radical feminists, should resist BDSM and other kinds of domination/subordination dynamics, which are both the results of patriarchal trainings and what patriarchy (male dominance) feeds on "as vultures feed on carrion". A choice for (or a vision of) a healthier form of sexuality -- that is gender role-free and based on humanity, equality, respect, mutuality, and affection -- is in fact both more joyful and progressive! Trust me, this is what I believe...
By the way, I just wondered: Is there anyone else (apart from me) who agrees with that Dworkin quote above? Delphyne? Xochitl? Lost Clown? Anyone else? Please let me know (that would be nice).