Huge news, guys.
I’m getting hate comments on Instagram again. And I couldn’t be more thrilled.
If you haven’t been with me through my veritable Rise and Fall of a Submissive Princess, I have a storied past with Instagram. My original account, askasub, is where most folks here may know me from. From 2019-2023 I made memes and disseminated advice there until I was unceremoniously deleted from the platform last February for making content that, in Meta’s view “promoted domestic violence” (read more on all that here). I turned right around and made a new account, askasub2.0, where I have accrued a good 34K in followers since starting over from zero (the old account had 115,000).
This is social media inside baseball, but I always tell anybody starting to get a little attention on Instagram that it’s from 20,000-50,000 followers that your life is a living hell. Up to 20K, you’re an indie darling. You’re an iykyk hit. Then when you start racking up the digits in the five figure zone, some of your diehards will see you as a sell out and a traitor (I’m still smarting from the takedown post I found back in 2020 saying I was a ‘straight girl gentrifying kink.’ I’m bisexual, thank you very much), and new people see you with less context and feel entitled to leave one of the comments I get quite frequently: “why is this on my feed??” (idk, man! get out of here!)
All this to say, I’m starting to get more random strangers interpreting my lighthearted memes as an attack on them. This time around? I love it! I know it’s not personal, and it means my hard work to build back what I lost is paying off. Be mad! More engagement for me.
The surreal part of this is the “hate” (it’s really not that bad) I’m getting is similar to what I got back in the day. There are still newbies out there with similar misapprehensions and projections onto what I’m talking about. Which I honestly think is a great opportunity to revisit old issues and think about them again. There is always someone new to an age old, already settled argument. The sentiment in the comment I received today is an oldie but a goodie:
By the way, here’s the meme they commented on:
I’ve tackled the question of whether submission is feminist a number of times, but I’m happy to do it again. Why? Because it gets at the thorny center of how we perceive power and respect. Because everything is about sex, except sex, which is about what? Say it with me! Power!
Before I grapple with this question again, I should lay out my biases. As a bisexual sub, I have played with Doms and tops of multiple genders, but I am currently married to a cis, straight, white man who is my Dom. Regardless, I have also, at various times in my life, been called a man hater. My father is a narcissistic abuser and I’ve never been particularly keen on them as a group. Men, fathers, you name it. I’ve seen just about every male Dom who’s ever educated on Instagram get broadly cancelled for very good reasons. I’ve gotten the DMs from headless torsos objectifying me and non-consensually initiating a dynamic with me (despite me never having shown my face online). I’m tapped into the way men behave with my friends who are both pro-subs and full service sex workers. Taken as a group… well, you all know. Not so good.
And. My education and community work within the BDSM world has given me firsthand contact with many kind and thoughtful cis male Doms (and certainly trans masc Doms but I don’t think you’re being considered in this call out). I think men can see the role of Dominant and use it as a calling towards beautiful personal transformation. It’s not about lower d dominance. D/s is about listening and collaboration. Some men abuse the role and abuse their subs. But it’s not just men who wield power to harm others. One of my own core sexual traumas comes from a scene with a cis woman who heard I was a sub and inexpertly pulled my hair so hard it left my scalp sore for days, in addition to a bruise and blood blister she left on my neck that lingered for weeks. She didn’t know what she was doing, and used my body pretty recklessly in the process. And that, to my knowledge, had little to do with gender.
As mentioned, there are certainly individuals who call themselves “Doms” in a deep misunderstanding of what Risk Aware Consensual Kink is. For clarity’s sake, I’m leaving these individuals aside. You can learn more about them here:
But I think a conversation about individual actors within gender categories is as reductive as the “I have a Black friend” comment made when legitimate concerns about race are raised. Misogyny isn’t cured by the existence of good guys. It’s giving ‘not all men.’ Feminism is a broader issue, so before we can go any further, we have to define what feminism even is.
I came of age1 on SJW Tumblr and entered the job market in Sophia Amoruso and Cheryl Sandberg’s world. In the aughts, feminism writ large was largely white feminism. Jezebel feminism that often sought to sort who was in and out with, let’s just say it, catty takedowns. White feminism, as a branch of feminism, takes the plight of the white woman (almost a white man), and focuses on accruing privilege and power for individual women so they can get closer to that privilege ideal. The path to power women saw in this period was to Lean In and become Girlbosses.
Thankfully we’ve seen this trend unspool over recent years as (some) people have become more critical of capitalism as a means of leveling the playing field. As Audre Lorde put it, “the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.” I’ve looked on somewhat gleefully as a number of Girlbosses have been canceled in recent years because, as we suspected, you can’t exactly be a CEO and wholly unproblematic. So where does that leave us in terms of gender equality?
Mainstream Feminism has fractured into many expressions in the 2020’s, but as I see it there has been a particularly dizzying theme in the mix, which is choice feminism. Choice feminism is a pejorative term used to describe the belief that the individual choices of a woman are inherently feminist. If a woman chooses to have a career, that’s her choice and therefore feminist. If a woman chooses to be a stay-at-home mother, that’s her choice, and, again, a radical act. This focus on individual choices gets confusing when applied at scale. So… anything any woman does is empowering if she wants to do it? Yass female billionaires! Female war criminals! Pop off with your pink drone strikes, queen!
Running parallel to the proliferation of choice feminism is something I’m going to call “Taylor Swift Feminism.”2 Swift has been frequently criticized for her self-conceptualization as a perennial victim. Simultaneously, her lyrics often situate heras a powerful renegade, and anyone who doesn’t like her specifically as anti-woman. Is criticizing specific women’s private jet usage misogyny? Or is it just treating women as people, which was the goal all along? You might say this type of feminism circles right back to white feminism, or even hardcore old school patriarchy. White women’s perceived vulnerability, particularly about their hurt feelings, has been used to uphold not only patriarchy, but the ugliest parts of white supremacy, which I won’t trigger you with at the moment.
So if feminism isn’t about “girl = good,” then what are we even talking about?
The feminism I go in for personally is intersectional in nature. When white women dominate the conversation, we tend to form a kind of superficial human centipede around the outskirts of real questions about what matters to people’s lives. White women are famously invested in being liked, so we get completely tripped up by questions about how we fit into the collective. When we listen to feminist thinkers with marginalized identities, that’s when all of this falls into place. Your individual choices are tangential to issues like clean drinking water, a planet to live on, affordable and accessible childcare, abortions on demand without apology, trans and LGBTQ+ legal protections, and any number of issues that touch women’s ability to move safely through the world. Because when people who identify as women are safer, happier, and more fulfilled, we all are.
So where does consensual Dominance and submission between adults behind their own bedroom doors fit into this framework of feminism?
It kind of doesn’t.
This isn’t to say submission cannot be empowering, liberating, and joyful. I just think shoehorning people’s individual sexual preferences into this political box further dizzies the conversation. Mapping the good of the collective onto our individual choices feels in a way like those Dove ads with the women of many colors and body sizes and body hair preferences that are engineered to get us to feel like we’re friends with a corporation known for destroying the planet with single use plastic in addition to shady sexual abuse allegations in its supply chains. Is shaving my armpits feminist? The women enduring systemic sexual abuse on Unilever’s Kenyan tea plantations, I’d be willing to bet, don’t give a fuck about my armpits.
This sounds like I’m arguing against D/s. I’m really not. I just think there’s a reason this conversation is so confusing. It’s a logical red herring that has distracted our communities for generations. The focus on individuals is emphasized in the Taylor Swiftification of the word ‘feminist,’ as I believe this commenter was using it, and thus muddies the waters of what the political even means. In this paradigm, a man gets labeled ‘feminist’ if he likes and respects specific women in his life, votes Blue, etc. But maybe there should be another word for that, i.e. not being a J.D. Vance style man baby that doesn’t deserve sex in the first place? In fact, maybe calling individual men “feminists” is akin to “I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could have.” Maybe a policy or specific piece of legislation can uplift women, but the focus on the individual feels weirdly self-aggrandizing at this point.
Talking about this often feels like trying to nail smoke to the wall. It’s hard to continue to pull the thread of politics as applied to individual choices, particularly the longer I spend in the kink community. But I have to concede that I understand what outsiders are seeing when they look in on kink from the outside, and it’s something I’ve coined a term for: The Window Test.
If you were to look in on a kink scene from outside a window, you might see a Dom wailing on a sub with impact toy until that sub screams and cries. From outside the window, you’re going to think something awful is happening to that sub, and that Dom is some kind of maniac. But when you’re outside the window, you may not know that these two have negotiated this scene as a way of experiencing pleasure in their own language. You don’t know how it feels for them, or how they’ve been waiting their entire lives to find someone to finally do this with in this cruel, vanilla world.
I bring up sadism and masochism as an example, as most people conflate Doms with Sadists. As a masochist myself, I enjoy aversive sensation (pain play) for a number of reasons. It can be sexually arousing, sure, but it can also be deeply emotionally cathartic. And my partner, a sadist, provides this experience to me because He enjoys providing it. We like it. End of story. He’s not standing over me cackling maniacally because he finally gets to hit a woman. Becoming an empathetic and well-trained sadist is a freakish long-con to commit to just to get to do violence on women3. Not to sound flippant, but men perpetrate violence on women every day without any BDSM-bonafides to back them up. In fact, the more I describe this logical inconsistency, the more it reminds me of the bathroom fictions first used to discriminate against gay men and now trans people. “Men” aren’t “dressing up as women” to gain access to women’s bathrooms to abuse them. They do that in the comfort of their own homes without the trouble.
Further, the assertion that opposite-sex D/s play is disrespectful to the female submissive actually tells on the person espousing the belief more than condemning the people they’re going after. Why is it that these people think that Dominance is inherently more powerful and worthy of respect than submission? Because submission is coded vulnerable, and thereby… gasp… female? Who’s a misogynist now?
Writing in her 2015 book, Thinking Kink, author Catherine Scott puts it this way:
Whenever the figure of the male dominant was mentioned, it was usually in concerned terms by feminists who assumed that men who play the dominant role in BDSM must necessarily represent masculinity gone wild. Even though it is feminism which challenges the very belief that nature slots male and female into neat dom/sub roles, there still seemed to be an unease among feminists who felt that there exists a base instinct in men to dominate women, which if allowed free rein via kink, would become dangerous. . .
Although the character of Christian Grey has been highlighted as cause for concern, again by feminists who feel his behavior outside the bedroom is borderline stalker-ish at times, there is significant evidence to suggest that he is a character not created by a male conspiracy to render women submissive, but rather a melding together of female desires to have a man who is ridiculously rich and successful at a young age, good looking, meticulously organized, and adventurous in the bedroom. If the female sub/male dom pairing really is such a patriarchal fantasy, then why is it women who were seeking out erotic literature with this theme in their droves, but not men?
In her essay "Of the Flesh Fancy: Spanking and the Single Girl," Chris Daley writes how her partner "assumes the role of dominating top with breathtaking mastery in bed despite being decidedly untoppish in real life, a delightful combination." She also notes that mimicking traditional gender roles in BDSM play is not the same as endorsing those roles in reality; the power she consents to give her partner over her in kink is a "power over me he'll never experience in any other realm of the relationship." Toni Bentley goes even further, suggesting that her sexual partner is happy to even be inferior in other areas of their relationship: "He’s a doer, not a thinker, and he openly admits that he wants a woman to be smarter than he is." These men sound distinctly like the sensitive, reconstructed "New Man" who was much-discussed in the 90s and 2000s - one at ease with himself, not constantly trying to prove himself via macho pissing contests or by degrading women, and one unthreatened by intelligent, strong women. Perhaps it is only when a man has abandoned the toxic demands of patriarchy-shaped masculinity that he can truly be dominant.
I’m cutting myself off so I don’t excerpt the whole chapter, but in summation: I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of using “feminism” as a rubric to prove our worthiness (or specifically, a male Dom’s worthiness) to engage in BDSM. Once inside the journey of BDSM, many of us know how it transforms our souls, spurs us to consider how non-consensual dominance is wielded on our lives every day, and encourages us to dismantle it. In that sense, it is an agent of feminism, if not inherently feminist itself.
tl;dr: haters gonna hate. Keep doing your thing.
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I’m not going to get into first and second wave feminism here. Again, brevity. If I’m not careful I’ll write a book.
I’m sorry, Swifties. I really do enjoy a lot of her music. (I’m a folklore girlie)
Again, Fake Doms exist. I’m just drilling down on this hate-comment’s focus on feminist men as Doms.
I never know what to say when my friends/people on the internet make these “it’s not feminist”/“kink is just misogyny” arguments. Thank you for continuing to put the rebuttal into words 💕