There’s a line of dialogue in Truth or Dare, my kinky romance novella, which is taken from real life. The rest is total fiction, of course, but as a writer I needed an emotional hurdle for Beth, the protagonist, to overcome as she learns to embrace herself and her desires. So I did something unusual for me as a fiction writer and pinched an idea from life.
The line is: “As a feminist, I cannot condone this.”
Those words were said to me twenty years ago when I first came out to my oldest friend. We’d known each other since childhood, but were in our late twenties the night we sat on my front porch, swatting away mosquitos in the evening warmth and drinking red wine. Fueled by liquid courage, I first told her I was bisexual, which she didn’t fully believe; bi-erasure was a standard in our youth. Then I told her I was polyamorous and she shrugged, because, as I later learned, she didn’t know what that meant.
If it’s occurring to you that there were already communication problems in our conversation, you’re catching on quicker than I did at the time.
Finally, I came out to her as a submissive. Not only as someone who enjoyed a bit of kinky sex, but who, at that point in my life, was experimenting pretty intensely with differing levels of power exchange in ongoing relationships and lifestyle D/s. I’d dived in headfirst into the deep end of the BDSM pool and was enjoying madly splashing around.
Cue the line.
“As a feminist, I cannot condone this.”
I am not Beth, who as a character struggles with her desires in a way I never did. Truth or Dare is not my story; it’s fiction, a kinky, erotic fantasy designed to arouse and entertain. I’d been exploring BDSM for a few years before that conversation and felt secure in my strength and independence. Also in my feminism. My undergraduate years had been spent attending marches and writing ranting political essays for the university magazine. My postgraduate thesis was on feminist theory and popular culture, and while I was never going to make it as an academic, nothing would make me doubt myself or my politics. Not even the judgement of a friend.
Yet after that night, it was another decade before I’d dare come out again to anyone outside the kink scene. To this day, I remain wary about who I reveal the truths of my identity to and exactly how much I say when I do.
Words have power. Something I tried to explore in Truth or Dare, where the consequences of poor communication linger and Beth must learn to fight for her own desires, even when those desires are to give in to someone else. It’s one of the contradictions which make kink so much fun. Those of us who fantasize about giving up control (or dare I say it, having control forcibly taken from us) are still ultimately in control of the fantasy. I could have told my vanilla friend that I was just into a few kinky bedroom games, handcuffs maybe, a bit of spanking, and she might have understood. We were progressive feminists who championed women’s sexual freedom, after all. But my experimentation was more complicated than that. My life and my desires were more complicated than that. And I didn’t want to simplify myself for her comfort.
This wasn’t about sex. This was my sexuality. Who I am.
So how do I reconcile my feminism, always outspoken, with my desire to get down on my knees to another? I grew up in the wake of second wave feminism, when getting women into male dominated spheres of influence felt like the whole point. We were out to prove women could do anything men could. Less attention was paid back then to the need for entirely dismantling those systems and structures that valued traditionally masculine activities over those traditionally coded feminine, let alone ditching the whole masculine-feminine binary in the first place. Feminism has grown a little more nuanced now, thankfully. Yet it still gets complicated when you find yourself intensely turned on by the thought of being overpowered by a strong, dominant man.
By the time I was writing Truth or Dare so many years later, I could better articulate my response. I had Beth say it in the book: women should not police other women’s desires. As feminists we’re on a really dangerous, slippery slope when we start telling other women what they should and should not do with their bodies.
Yet, it’s a view I’ve encountered more than once. I have been told that being my submissive is internalizing my own oppression; that submissive women need rescuing from themselves; that we’re vulnerable, or manipulated. I always respond with: but what of my choice? Consent is at the heart of BDSM, even when we play games with it (especially when we play games with it). Anyone who’s ever used a traffic light system of safe words from red to green knows how inherent active consent is to kink; everything stops when that trigger is pulled, at any time, by any participant. Just as anyone who’s ever filled out some multi-page checklist of likes, dislikes and limits, compared it to another’s checklist, and agreed on what will happen in a scene, knows the value of negotiation and the importance of respecting your partners’ choices. Even if their choices are to be thoroughly disrespected…in that context, inside that scene, within the boundaries they set.
Respect and choice. Kink depends on it. Feminism fights for it. In Truth or Dare, Beth learns to stand up for who she is and what she wants, and is rewarded with all the explicit, kinky, erotic fun. Real life doesn’t always run so neatly, of course, but looking back now from over twenty years later, at an age when I’m more often found having an early night in with a cup of tea than on my knees to anyone, I still embrace and celebrate who I am.
I am a submissive. I am a feminist. And to anyone bothered by it, I suggest examining your feminism, and not my sexuality.
Truth or Dare is available from Amazon.
Read an excerpt from Truth or Dare.