The appropriation of BDSM imagery is problematic because while community members understand that it is important to be sensitive to the needs, boundaries, and rules of players in order for a scene to function fairly and enjoyably, mainstream porn is primarily about getting off as quickly as possible. Add to that a disgraceful lack of sexual education (both in safety and in pleasure) across the country, and a general belief perpetuated by the media that women are sex objects to be consumed, and you have a rape culture that started by borrowing from BDSM’s images without reading its rules.
This reality raises some interesting questions for safe, sane, and consensual BDSM practitioners. If, as someone who identifies as a sexual submissive, you like to fantasize about being raped, are you now complicit in this pervasive rape culture? Are you not only complicit, but also key in perpetuating the acceptability of violence, regardless of how private and personal your desire is? From another perspective—are you actually a victim? Is your fantasy merely a product of a culture that coerces you into believing that kind of violence is acceptable, or even desirable?
Alternatively, is your desire (however bastardized and appropriated) still your own—your fantasy of “nonconsent” yours to choose and act out in a consenting environment? A personal choice when feminist ideology emphasizes choice above all else?
And finally, and perhaps most important, with all of its limitations, safe words, time limits, and explicitly negotiated understandings of what is allowed—is the consensual SM relationship actually the ultimate in trust and collaborative “performance,” its rules and artifice the very antithesis of rape?
Paradoxically, sexual submission and rape fantasy can only be acceptable in a culture that
doesn’t
condone them. On a simplistic level, a fetish is only a fetish when it falls outside the realm of the real, and, as I mentioned, the reason why some feminists fear or loathe the BDSM scene is that it is all too familiar. When a woman is subjected to (or enjoying, depending on who is viewing and participating) torture, humiliation, and pain, many feminists see the six o’clock news, not a pleasurable fantasy, regardless of context. Even someone who identifies as a sexual submissive, someone like me, can understand why it’s difficult to view these scenes objectively. Many fantasies are taboo for precisely that reason—it’s close to impossible to step beyond the notion that a man interested in domination is akin to a rapist, or that if a woman submits, she is a helpless victim of rape culture. But consenting BDSM practitioners would argue that their community at large responsibly enacts desires without harm, celebrating female desire and (as is so fundamental in dismantling rape culture) making (her) pleasure central.
As a community, feminists need to truly examine whether or not it’s condescending to say to a woman who chooses the fantasy of rape that she is a victim of a culture that seeks to demean, humiliate, and violate women. Whether or not it’s acceptable to accuse her of being misguided, misinformed, or even mentally ill. The reality is that when two people consent to fabricate a scene of nonconsent in the privacy of their own erotic lives, they are not consenting to perpetuate the violation of women everywhere. The true problem lies in mainstream pornography’s appropriation of fetish tropes—while BDSM practitioners are generally serious about and invested in the ideological beliefs behind their lifestyle choices, the average mainstream porn user doesn’t usually take the time to understand the finer points of dominance and submission (or consent and safety) before he casually witnesses a violation scene in a mainstream pornographic film or image. While early black-and-white fantasy films of Bettie Page being kidnapped and tied up by a group of insatiable femmes are generally viewed as light, harmless erotic fun, that kind of imagery, when injected into mainstream pornography (and even Hollywood), can have epic cultural ramifications. Sadly, gratuitous depictions of violence against women on the big screen have effectively taken the taboo-play element out of fetish imagery. Bombarded with an onslaught of violent images in which a woman is the victim, viewers fail to see where fantasy and fetish end and reality begins.
BDSM pornography is so excruciatingly aware of its own ability to perpetuate the idea that women yearn to be violated that it actually fights against that myth. At the end of almost every authentic BDSM photo set, you’ll see a single appended photo of the participants, smiling and happy, assuring us that what we’ve seen is theater acted out by consenting adults, proving that fetish porn often exists as a careful, aware construct that constantly references itself as such.
The reality is that the activities and pornographic imagery of BDSM culture are problematic only because we have reached a point where a woman’s desire is completely demeaned and dismissed. If women’s pleasure were paramount, this argument (and the feminist fear of sexual submission) wouldn’t exist. When women are consistently depicted as victims of both violence and culture, it’s difficult to see any other possibilities. Feminists have a responsibility not only to fight and speak out against the mainstream appropriation of BDSM, but also to support BDSM practitioners who endorse safe, sane, and consensual practice.
When the mainstream appropriation of BDSM models is successfully critiqued, dismantled, and corrected, a woman can then feel safe to desire to be demeaned, bound, gagged, and “forced” into sex by her lover. In turn, feminists would feel safe accepting that desire, because it would be clear consensual submission.
Because “she was asking for it” would finally be true.
If you want to read more about MEDIA MATTERS, try:
• Offensive Feminism: The Conservative Gender Norms That Perpetuate Rape Culture, and How Feminists Can Fight Back BY JILL FILIPOVIC
• An Old Enemy in a New Outfit: How Date Rape Became Gray Rape and Why It Matters BY LISA JERVIS
• Purely Rape: The Myth of Sexual Purity and How It Reinforces Rape Culture BY JESSICA VALENTI
If you want to read more about MUCH TABOO ABOUT NOTHING, try:
• A Love Letter from an Anti-Rape Activist to Her Feminist Sex-Toy Store BY LEE JACOBS RIGGS
• The Process-Oriented Virgin BY HANNE BLANK
• Real Sex Education BY CARA KULWICKI
10
Invasion of Space by a Female
BY COCO FUSCO
Editors’ Note: The following is an excerpt from Coco Fusco’s recent performance project and book
A Field Guide for Female Interrogators.
We include it here because while much has been written about rape as a weapon of war, and as a way to keep female soldiers subservient, very little has been said about the ways in which our government, much like the entertainment industry, compels women to relinquish control of their own sexuality in exchange for the illusion of individual power.
YOU MAY BE FUMING by the end of this essay, because I will not have made an effort to catalog all the obstacles female soldiers face in what remains a nasty line of work in an excessively masculine and misogynist milieu. Quantifying adversity, however significant a feminist exercise, is insufficient means for understanding women’s relationship to power in a neoconservative state. Focusing exclusively on women’s experience of hardship may actually give the military more ways to obfuscate its excesses toward others. I’m not trying to suggest that sexual aggression as a form of torture is the only thing that should concern those who decide to think seriously about the war. But it would be unwise to overlook it. Torture dominates the discursive field of this war as a public image crisis for the U.S. military, as a practice to be rationalized through the verbal gymnastics of legal theorists, and as the paradigm through which the rights we grant our enemies are formulated and the righteousness of our own use of force is measured. The gendered and sexualized character of most publicized abuses gives its current incarnation a particularly sensationalist quality. I doubt the practice of torture by agents of a presumably democratic state has ever been so visible, or that that feminine visibility has contributed to its normalization.
Singling out the hapless “torture chicks” from the rest of the soldiers who authorized and committed abuse is an expedient distortion of the mistreatment of detainees and prisoners. It has helped the military to make the case in early stages of the Abu Ghraib scandal that abuse was the result of personal flaws in a few low-ranking soldiers, rather than wrongdoing all the way up the chain of command. It has diverted attention from the influence of a culture of sexual humiliation that is integral to military social life. The female soldiers who were court marshaled not only were not alone or in the majority, but the media’s homing in on them with greater intensity made torture at the hands of the U.S. military seem a lot less frightening. Yes, Lynndie England had a guy on a leash, but in the picture she wasn’t choking him by pulling it. Yes, the prisoner in the picture with Sabrina Harman is dead, but her smiling presence in the shot does not indicate that she killed him, only that she was responding inappropriately to his death.
Here’s how the implicit argument goes: How bad can torture really be if it’s performed by a member of the “weaker sex”? Doesn’t torture require something more aggressive than insults and humiliating acts? Aren’t most women in the military struggling to survive and get ahead in an overwhelmingly masculine environment where they are frequently subjected to unwanted sexual advances? Can poor, uneducated women who themselves are victims of their boyfriends, in addition to being tools of an authoritarian power structure like the military, be blamed for violating human rights as part of their job? If torture involves women doing things of a sexual nature to men, which has been the case in numerous interrogations in Guantánamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, can it even be called torture?
Military investigators have determined that some female interrogators’ sexual taunts fall under the authorized tactic called “futility,” meaning that they contribute to convincing a prisoner that all his efforts to resist are doomed to fail. Other actions were found to fall under permissible “mild non-injurious physical touching.” More extreme actions, such as the smearing of fake menstrual blood, were deemed excessive, but a crucial rationalization was added that absolves the chain of command.
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Those actions were also characterized as retaliatory, enabling the military to blame the individual who did not seek prior authorization, which, it is implied, she would not have received. Nonetheless, no formal disciplinary action was taken against the interrogator, who also refused to be interviewed. The ostensible reason given was that too much time had passed and the interrogator was no longer in the armed forces. However, in not taking action, the military implicitly invites others to continue the practice as long as they can keep it under wraps.
While the state and the media may use cultural perceptions of women to temper the image of Americans as torturers, their presence also serves a larger agenda. That agenda is emblematic of the ways that the Right has marshaled the discourses of identity politics in the twenty-first century to serve conservative causes. As the number of women in the U.S. military grows, the ways to capitalize on them by transforming their particular assets into weapons increase. Cultural perceptions of women can be used strategically to humanize the current U.S. military occupation of Iraq, in that women are assumed to be less threatening. Women’s presence also creates the impression that American institutions engaging in domination are actually democratic, since they appear to practice gender equity. On the other hand, specific use in military interrogations of women to provoke male anxiety actually corresponds to an authorized tactic called Invasion of Space by a Female. The existence of this standardized term is testimony in itself of the state’s rationalization of its exploitation of femininity. Despite all the hand wringing in the media about why some military police at Abu Ghraib could not prevent themselves from brutalizing prisoners, little attention has been given to the implications of formulating strategies that turn female sexual exhibitionism into a weapon.
There are many different ways in which women function as a mitigating and punitive force in the military carceral scenario. The testimony of several detainees suggests that they are frequently confused by the presence of women soldiers in military prisons. Sometimes they assume that the women are sex workers who are brought there to provide services to Americans, or simply to sexually torture them. Testimony also indicates that some prisoners are particularly sensitive to the effects of sexual taunting and insults by women soldiers, and that this vulnerability is exploited.
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But there are also plenty of ways in which the routine duties of military police can be experienced as humiliation by prisoners: They control prisoners’ movements, strip and search them, shave and shear them, and survey them as they bathe and relieve themselves. The interactions with MPs are disciplinary performances of subjection, and gender can be used easily to intensify the experience without its appearing to be intended or considered sanctionable. An account by one interrogator noted that female MPs have at times been assigned in order to soften the experience of adolescent detainees. On other occasions their presence is intended to irritate male prisoners, who, it is assumed, will perceive it as an affront to their dignity.
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That effect is not inevitable, however: Former detainee Moazzam Begg writes in his memoir that he developed a fairly amicable rapport with one military policewoman who guarded him.
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