Gandhi said that if you want to change the world, you have to be the change you want to see. To that end, Insatiable Desire brings you No Stupid (Kink) Questions, a series of questions asked by novice kinksters around the web. If you have a question for us, leave it in comments, or send it to rayne (at) insatiabledesire (dot) com with “NS(K)Q” in the subject.

Question 39:

I don’t believe in BDSM. You’ll never convince me that women actually like being beaten and controlled. In fact, I think all of you submissives need a good dose of feminism to wake you up and show you how you’re helping the patriarchy. What’s stopping me, or someone like me, from reporting your “owner” to the police?

~deep breath~

Where to begin…

First of all, let’s look at this “feminist” idea that women are too stupid to know they’re being manipulated, shall we?

Because you know that’s what you’re saying, right?

You can’t have it both ways. Either women are dumb sheep who can’t take care of themselves and need someone to show them the way, or women are strong, and intelligent, and capable of making their own choices. The two are polar opposites. They can’t be both.

And from where I sit, you stepping in and telling other women which choices they’re allowed to make and which choices they have to first consult your brand of feminism¹ before they’re allowed to make them is even worse than what the patriarchy is doing. Your way is utterly hypocritical and even more demeaning.

Because the patriarchy? It wasn’t built by a group of men who decided they wanted to rule all the world’s women. It formed all on its own by an ever-evolving society who believed that the human female was better at child-rearing while the human male was better at hunting and protecting. And for a very long time, almost everyone was content with the way this worked. Some women even used it to their advantage. Spend five minutes in a history book, and you’ll find a great many men were completely under the spell of some woman’s “feminine wiles” and weren’t really in control at all.

The war on the patriarchy began when the human male went to war for the umpteenth time, and the human female realized that she was going to have to pick up the slack. Who wants to play second fiddle when they’re running things because first fiddle is MIA? No matter why first fiddle is MIA, the answer is: no one.

I mean, maybe it didn’t go down just like that². We also have to take into consideration the idea that women were looking at men doing men things and going, “That looks like fun. Why can’t I do that?” and finding the answer to be, “Because a man says I can’t.” to which they responded, “Fuck. That.”

Woohoo! I fucking love those women. Fuck that, indeed!

But even there, I hardly think all of the men telling women they weren’t allowed to do men things were doing it out of some misguided attempt to hold women down or discriminate against them.

Years ago, when I called my grandfather, all excited, because I’d landed my first “man job³,” he told me I should find “a nice woman’s job, like a bank teller or sales rep,” and my grandfather wanted nothing but the best for all of his grandchildren. He just didn’t like to see women getting their hands dirty. That’s the man’s job. If a woman is getting her hands dirty, her man isn’t doing his job. Which is sexist (toward both women AND men), I’ll admit, but my grandfather was in his 90s when he finally succumbed to the deep sleep a few years ago, so that he was able to accept women in the work force at all is a huge plus in his favor, I’d say.

Honestly, what I think it all boils down to is the irresistible status quo, and the worry that men wouldn’t be men anymore if women started doing men things.

That’s a scary thought for cisgender men, then and now. That’s a scary thought for me, and I’m not even completely attached to my gender identity. I mean, do I feel like a woman? I don’t know! What does it even mean to “feel like a woman”? I have a vagina⁴. It feels like a vagina. Does that count as “feeling like a woman”? But the idea of someone taking my womanhood away from me infuriates and frightens me. So I know where cisgender men are coming from.

Besides that, the patriarchy isn’t telling me that I shouldn’t allow myself to be dependent upon my husband. The patriarchy isn’t telling me I’m too stupid to make decisions for myself. The patriarchy isn’t telling me that some outside entity has made all my decisions for me, and I’m just plodding along allowing it. YOU are.

The patriarchy is just being the patriarchy, and saying it’s content with the current status quo–which won’t be the status quo anymore once we’re able to get the old, rich, white men out of positions of power, and start inserting people who know what it’s actually like living in today’s society (and not on a sky high pedestal built on someone else’s blood, sweat, and tears) in their place. I know it. You know it. Hell, they know it. It’s why they’re so terrified of losing their tax breaks and elevating the impoverished.

Every submissive/slave/bottom I know (male AND female) sought out their relationship dynamic. No one coerced them. No one put the idea in their head. No one brainwashed them into thinking they couldn’t live without someone controlling (some aspects of) their lives.

They learned about kink on their own. They realized that kink turns them on. They went looking for someone who would cater to their specific kinks while they catered to the kinks of their someone.

Bottom line, though? Feminism is the reason I’m able to live the way I do today. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

As for your question…

Nothing is stopping you (or another misguided soul like you) from reporting my owner. While you’re at it, feel free to go through my archive and pull photographic proof. I’ll happily use my (12-year-old) blog, and my contract, and my 5,000 Twitter followers (or at least the ones who are willing) to set a precedent for using consent and happiness as a defense. Including all the posts where I use far too many words to defend⁵ the multiple times he’s agreed to back off because I couldn’t handle it.

But before you do, consider this:

I asked him for this lifestyle.

When we first met, I lied a lie so completely over the top that it’s laughable, and anyone who actually knew me would have known right away that it was a lie. I told him I wasn’t into kink. I said I’d love to date him, but he would have to drop all that kinky bullshit because it just wasn’t me. And he agreed.

He wanted me. He wanted to control me, too, because that comes natural to a dominant sadist like him when they meet a headstrong firecracker like me, but ultimately, he just wanted me, in whatever form he could have me. He even agreed to just date and fuck, no strings attached, when I told him I didn’t think I was ready for another relationship, and that is so completely out of the realm of what he’s normally comfortable with that it’s insane that he did.

And then, one day, I couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted to be spanked and fucked and collared so fucking bad, that I just blurted out, “I lied. I’m totally kinky. I want to submit to you.” (or something…it was 12 years ago, cut me some slack)

Before I was in this relationship, I was a ticking time bomb; an adrenaline junkie. I put myself in horrifying situations, knowing full well what I was doing to myself, and expecting to wake up dead one day. I didn’t take care of myself, and I didn’t care. Back then, I truly had no fucks to give. Not a single one.

I did drink constantly, do all kinds of street drugs until I couldn’t function without them, and hang around with an abusive, violent crowd. I had no support network. Literally no one cared about me. Or if they did, they did fuck all to show it. Including my family.

Today, I have made a (very small, in the grand scheme of things) name for myself in my little corner of the internet. I’ve held down multiple jobs (before leaving due to irreconcilable differences, like the boss calling me a “fucking idiot” to my face when I informed her it was taking hours for the oven to reach temp–for the record, the heating element was broken). I even managed to land a job as Editor In Chief of a well known (at the time) adult e-publication and held it just fine until the boss’s last brain cell melted, and he hacksawed an entire (dysfunctional but thriving) community to pieces.

I fucking love life. Like, really, really fucking love it. And I live the shit out of it how I want to. I’m happy. I’m (mostly) healthy. I’m confident. I don’t have suicidal thoughts anymore. I have some fucks to give.

I’m fucking thriving, not just surviving. I’ve never been able to say that before. Never.

I probably could have pulled myself up by the bootstraps by myself if I wanted to, but knowing myself like I do, I can say with a good amount of certainty that I wouldn’t have. The thought didn’t even occur to me until M flat out demanded that I be better. I mean, not that I heal over night, but that I stop acting like a wounded puppy, and start fucking living my life how I want to live my life. And I am eternally grateful.

Without him, there is no me. Not just because he’s fostered that mindset, but because it has been true since the day he gave me permission to be myself. No one had ever done that.

This isn’t always the case. Most people are fully stable when they enter into a BDSM-related relationship, and some would argue that they should be. Those folks are looking to scratch an itch of a different kind. They don’t need someone else in control of them to feel like they have worth in someone’s eyes, or enjoy the release of feeling pain physically instead of emotionally for a little while, or enjoy the many other things that draw me to kink that are considered “unhealthy”.

They just enjoy it. That’s it. And who the fuck are you to tell them that they can’t? Seriously.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

<sub>1. I say “your brand” because most of the feminists I surround myself with believe that feminism is really and truly about giving women the right to choose, and accepting their choices, and not making their choices for them based on convoluted ideals.
2. These are, obviously, over-simplified explanations. I realize there was a lot more involved in the beginning of the feminist movement. I don’t need a lecture on feminism, or its history, thank you.
3. I was running veneer dryers in a plywood factory. There were only two other female factory employees. The rest worked in the office.
4. I’m being facetious, here. Having a vagina does not a woman make.
5. In some circles in the kink community, a dominant willing to give up some control over his submissive, even temporarily and no matter the reason, is considered a pussy, so I’m always feeling the need to defend his position. In my opinion, though, this takes immense strength, and proves that my owner is responsible and actually cares for me.</sub>