An Essay on The Societal Dominatrix Part 6. Epilogue - (or Time to Say the Safeword)

And so, I stick the Patriarchy and Feminism out in the garden to scare away inattentive birds because it’s time to bring things to an end.  As things draw to a conclusion, anyone whose read this all the way through might be thinking, “Wait. Why is it wrong to compare feminism to a dominatrix again?”  Well, if you recall, I sort of cheated my way through that question already.  It isn’t! If you frame it correctly.

I would use dominatrices as metaphors all the time if I wasn’t afraid of making folks feel unsettled.  For me it means something fun and at least a little sexy but too powerful to pretend that you’re the one who has total control of the situation.  Here! I’ll prove it.

I should've been a political cartoonist!  Except every cartoon would just be this picture with the text changed.

On that note, credit is due again to Quiet Riot Girl, my muse in this essay.  I was never trying to accuse her of a bad metaphor, just trying to work out in my head why I've seen the metaphor reoccur in various discussions.  I've been reading her work long enough to know, unless my reading comprehension skills are that terrible, that she’d never make anyone’s person-hood contingent on virginity or some other form of supplication like society tries to do to the societal Dominatrix.  Quite the contrary!  Feminism rather seems to chafe her because she often sees it either failing to recognize, help prevent, or outright furthering restraints on male sexuality.  I've also bumped into her comments on enough of the pro-kink sites I lurk around on that she does her homework, and makes her statements from a place of education, not ignorance. 

One of QRG’s favorite dragons to slay is metrophobia, the fear of the metrosexual (and not a fear of cities, in this context).  The term metrosexual was popularized to describe those men who preferred to don the suit of a cultured (or at least pop cultured) man about town as their blatantly constructed sexual identity. They were the sort of men who would have probably been described as gentleman, dandies, or slick city dudes in the past.  The term was originated by Mark Simpson, the same clever author who created Miss Whiplash, Feminism-Dominatrix incarnate.  (If QRG was my muse, I suppose that makes Mr. Simpson my Apollo.)  He’s a very smart man who noted that men were very much constructing identities for themselves (e.g. macho man, nerd, twink, bear, father, hooligan) and performing them in life, often as sexual roles.  Mr. Simpson was titling a new ascendant (or possibly reascendant) role and I know he didn’t mean it to exclude gay men, or be exclusive to gay men.   I've seen, for what I assume are homophobic reasons, the term simultaneously used to describe a man who was ‘doing gay things’ but was really for real straight, or the new epitomic gay man who may just be buried in the closet.  The word 'metrosexual' was being used as a shield to hold gay at bay, and a sword to bring accusations to bare.  For other people, either free of homophobia or at least conscious how homophobic the accusations were getting,  the word was still being used as a slur.  Suddenly it became about narcissism or a way to duck out on all the hard work it takes to be a real sexy man.  We had pure metrophobia.  People began to construct retrosexual identities in defense against the metrosexual, rather hilariously missing and enforcing Mark Simpson’s whole original point.  Metrophobia existed because, since it was new, loud, and well funded, the desire of men to be desirable had never seemed so dangerously obvious in society’s collective memory.

Society needs men to do their jobs right and has always cast its eyes around to find examples of men doing manhood incorrectly, to show people the price of failure.  One of the threats and insults that society likes to hang over men is perpetual virginity.  Metrosexuals desire to be seen as desirable and on their own terms.  If they can succeed on those terms, then the threat would become hollow.  

 Society is largely okay with kind attracting kind; it’s rather expected that the ethnic men sleep with ethnic women, poor men with poor women, dim men with dim women, shallow men with shallow women etc.   Sometimes relationships don’t follow that script.  There are also men where kind doesn’t make sense to attract kind or, if even it did, the man in question would still be winning because the trait they have is desirable in women.  For instance- Pretty men, virginal men, feminine men, shy men, submissive men, etc.

So society attempts to socially pillory such men, publicly scapegoating them.  If we can’t succeed in shaming such men into good behavior, then at least we might make everyone else afraid to associate themselves with such an obvious failure. And the whole time we’re doing it we assure everyone that he’s the threat and we’re the victims in this scenario. 

When the cobblestones and rotten vegetables are raining down on whichever male archetype has fallen into disfavor, we can always count on a certain woman to put on the best show.    She laughs the loudest. She kicks the stocks.  She really grinds her vegetables into the man’s face and hair.  She offers him a cup of water and then wantonly drinks it herself.   Her favorite  trick, and the crowd’s too, is to twirl and dangle the keys  in the prisoner’s face and casually fiddle with the locks, even going so far as occasionally slide in the wrong key now and then and test it in the lock.

That’s why society loves the Dominatrix.

Wait… Isn’t she enjoying this just a bit too much?  She’s not going to actually let him out is she?  Why would she do that?

That’s why society hates the Dominatrix.