Still, it’s assumed that the ladies in these scenarios are not actually lesbians. If they were, they would, by definition, have no interest in men as sex partners. No, the assumption is that these young, attractive women would enthusiastically welcome a man into the mix. In fact, they may even be presumed to feel that the girl-on-girl fun is good for a laugh, and gets the guys turned on, but falls more under the category of drunken rowdiness or “being wild”, whatever that means. Do those girls really get off on it themselves? That seems to be beside the point.
The taboo for women, then, is not making it with other women. The taboo is not making it with men. At all. Ever. The heterosexual male world seems not to take the rejection very well, and treats actual lesbians with a fair amount of contempt, not to mention outright hostility and violence. Not only do real lesbians decline to have relations with men, they also tend to neglect the work that goes into being femme. Not having a reason to live up to the standards of attractiveness straight men go for, lesbians may very easily forego shaving, makeup, femme clothes, long, tousled hair, and so on. A certain subset of men seem to take this as a personal affront, and will enthusiastically call such women out with slurs such as “dyke” or worse.
For men, on the other hand, making it with another guy is the taboo, the big one, from which one cannot come back. While bisexual women get a big thumbs-up from most men (but not, sadly enough, most gay women), bisexual men are treated as dangerous. Women tend to shy away, out of fear that they will be a disease vector, that they are really gay and only want a woman for social approval, or just because they can’t stomach the idea of man-on-man sex. Thus, the straight/gay dichotomy holds up more solidly with men than with women. When a man comes out as gay, the assumption is he’s strictly for the fellas and no gray area at all. Bisexual men, and it’s certain that they exist, are more likely to repress and avoid bringing it up or ever experimenting with it. If they can get off with ladies, it’s just as well to stick with that and not open up such a big can of worms. Until you find him trolling Craigslist or airport bathrooms.
Perhaps the dichotomy has some connection to biology, though. I have heard of research which finds that men really are more either/or in their sexuality – either it gets them up or it doesn’t. Women, lacking such a distinctive and obvious meter for their arousal level, are more apt to try something to find out if it has any potential. Guys pretty much already know.
When it comes to BDSM, the whole situation gets even more complicated. Some of the foregoing holds true – bisexual women are quite common in the scene and ladies are quite apt to get intimate with each other to varying degrees. Many female subs are quite content to bottom for another woman, even though they are more likely to settle down with a male Dom. The poly kinky family frequently sports a male Dom and more than one female sub, an arrangement facilitated by flexibility with regards to women, sex, and gender. Men, on the other hand, tend to want either ladies or men, and not a lot of in between, at least when it comes to sex.
Still, BDSM is not always sexual, and many people are really quite firmly hetero when it comes to sex but much more flexible when it comes to straight-up BDSM play. Some go as far as to label themselves bi-kinky, because it is hard to take the sex out of it completely. Women often play together like school friends at a slumber party, and some men are perfectly content to play with other men or even have male submissives who are not their sex partners.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of this, except that BDSM is, at the same time, sexual and not sexual. Yes, one can conduct all manner of perverted fun without even exposing anyone’s genitals, much less connecting them. But at the same time, the vast majority of us do those things because it gets our motors running. It’s a very compelling reason to get into something, and many of us really need a compelling reason to do something so socially unaccepted. When these ideas start creeping into one’s head around the same time that they start getting tingly feelings down there, it doesn’t go away easily, if at all, and the connection can never truly be severed. While there are a few strange-even-for-us people who are really very asexual about it, I suspect that a lot of the “It’s not sexual” crowd are really just trying to bowdlerize it to make it seem more acceptable.
In the end, all I can really say is that clearly gender matters less to us than it does to the vanilla. It’s not a huge stretch – transgression in one area tends to bleed into others. Gender queerness is part and parcel of the scene. This is one reason why hardcore female supremacists and Gorean types turn me off; they want to codify the gender structure more strictly than even vanilla folks do. But then, a lot of us actually get off on codifying things. So perhaps I can forgive them that. D/s as the fetishization of OCD, in a sense. Still, as much as I like things organized, and rules can be very sexy, I like my gender fluidity and flexibility, too, and I think that’s because, deep down, I’m really in love with humans. I enjoy studying them and puzzling over their complicated natures, and as much as they sometimes annoy me, they are endlessly fascinating. And if both halves are fascinating, then I can’t limit sexiness to just one half.
0 comments:
Post a Comment