Dirty Little Feminist: Sex therapists on the politics of desiring degradation
You’re sitting sipping cheap beer while you and your friends gawk at yet another hit show about young women living in the big city. This time the show is Girls. Gasps and giggles arise as you all watch main character, Hannah, get pinned down, degraded, and fucked by her situationship. Tension brews as he then quickly ushers her out of his shitty NYC apartment as if he didn’t just call her “a dirty little girl full of cum”.
You look at character Hannah, a feminist. Then you look around at the friends sitting on your couch, all feminists too. And you wonder how this scene has hit a group of strong, smart, queer women so hard. How have we all found ourselves in scenes like these, or more relevantly, what happens when we’ve liked it?
Sex therapist, Serafin Upton, tells me more about dominant and submissive dynamics in the bedroom and how we perceive our sexual desires. Right off the bat, Upton makes it clear that there is nothing wrong with wanting to be dominated. She explains that often people that feel pressured to maintain control in their daily lives, enjoy relinquishing authority in sex.
“Being dominated, in some respects, is like being taken care of.”
Dom/sub sexual practices are prevalent in all kinds of relationships regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation. But there is an unignorable gendered history to men controlling women that muddies the waters of modern sex dynamics. No wonder people freaked out over Sabrina Carpenter’s new album cover for Man’s Best Friend where she’s on all fours, having her hair tugged by an anonymous man. Our progressive alarm bells start ringing when we see an imbalanced heterosexual dynamic that was once compulsory.
This thirst for submission feels misaligned with the big strides we take towards empowerment and equality in our daily lives. We wouldn’t dream of tolerating this kind of shit from anyone on campus, at work, or at parties. But when we attempt to instill our day-to-day ideas onto our desires, our sexual needs aren’t met. The reality is the bedroom is a space that has always lived outside of governability.
Upton says, “If all these women like to be pushed up against a wall in the bedroom, clearly politics has not gotten rid of that desire.”
Drawing from what Upton says, I realise it wasn’t the sexual domination in the Girls scene that sent shivers down our spines. It was the way that Hannah’s situationship treated her after the fact. Many of us participate in sub/dom sexual dynamics without even realising or identifying with the term BDSM. It's not uncommon for practices like choking to now be considered in the same world as vanilla.
Sex positive therapist and author, Georgia Harrison, says the DS (dominance and submission) in BDSM has become a part of many of our erotic lives, but safe practices haven’t always come along with it. Harrison says, “As BDSM has become more mainstream some of the rituals and logistics around maintaining safe healthy dynamics with your lovers or play partners seems to have been lost.”
Both Upton and Harrison spoke of compartmentalising your sexual life as a way of maintaining a healthy power balance in your daily one. Harrison advises that creating routines and rituals around sex can help achieve this separation, like “having some kind of ritual that establishes from the day-to-day to the play”. She explains a concept called the ‘Transition Window’ where you physically set up your scene or put on a costume. This can establish when you are participating and consenting to these dynamics and when we are not.
Harrison considers who is being pleasured and how in her book Have a Good One; A Book About Sex and More Importantly Pleasure. She says her book is about decentering the erection and participating in “Activities that prompt people to create more diversity and creativity in their sexual play so that it moves away from a soul focus on penetration which is in itself a misogynistic view of sex”.
Harrison urges us to implement intentionality into our intimacy and recognise – as it has become so mainstream — when we’re taking part in BDSM. When this acknowledgement happens, we can prioritise big conversations and build safe words, yes/no/maybe lists, and effective after care. In taking care of yourself and others, your world of pleasure can be expanded and stimulated.
Just as feminists like Hannah are allowed to enjoy being dominated, you are too. But there are ways to distinguish your pleasure from your everyday that mean you can be called a bitch in bed and a boss in life all at the same time.