L&R July 2017 Magazine

Perhaps the resemblance of many play scenes to genuine depictions of violence
against women is why some feminists simply do not believe female submission in
BDSM can ever be consensual. A good example of this is the current debate around
the RMCP officer recently outed as enjoying BDSM pornography which depicted
submissive women. Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy writes that Cpl Jim Brown
"fetishised the abuse and degradation of women" by possessing photographs of
women in bondage, refusing to even entertain the possibility of consent or agency from
the women who participated in the pictures.
The BDSM community isn't immune to criticism from within, either—Margot Weiss
found that "many practitioners complained about sexism in the scene." Multiple women
reported to Weiss that they were presumed to be submissive by virtue of their gender,
regardless of their actual BDSM orientation. The automatic association of femaleness
with passivity is troubling: BDSM is at its most difficult for feminists to defend when it
reflects "normative gendered arrangements."
Women's sexual choices carry political weight, and in a society where equality is still
lacking in so many fields, many feminists still feel that to surrender power in the
bedroom is to surrender it elsewhere. Left-wing writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown echoed
30-year-old sentiments last week when she stated that the attraction of BDSM is
merely a modern ploy to disempower women as they get closer to equality: "They have
to be reminded of their place and must re-learn submission." So Professor Fahs may
be right to say that, “all sexual behaviours are at risk for distortion...by regressive
forces" when the popularity of one erotic book is interpreted as evidence that "tired of
the struggle for equality, women want to take refuge in being bossed around in the
bedroom by a man.”
But is the reactionary media's tendency to seize on any excuse to dismiss female
empowerment reason enough for women to avoid sexually submissive behaviour, or at
least fantasies of it? Norma Ramos thinks so: "I'm getting sexual pleasure from
[submission], so what do I do about this? You work to change that. You have to
challenge it," she says. For some feminists, the only answer to a pervasive culture of
sexual violence is for women who enjoy playing the sub to rewrite their fantasies.
https://www.bitchmedia.org/post/thinking-kink-female-submissives-BDSM-feministmagazine-sex-consent