Sexuality, Love, and One Man's Feminism, Part One
There are intersections of identity, and then there are intersections of identity. And the place where my politics and my sexuality meet is a great big traffc jam of identity.

Politics and Finding Love
Talking to my therapist recently, I realized that the intersection of my politics and my views on romance is somewhat more labyrinthian than I thought it was. My therapist had pointed out that it is the case that sometimes our politics and our romantic relationships can find themselves at odds. For instance, there have been times when I have been told by a lover that my raising my voice at her is much different (i.e. less acceptable) than her raising her voice at me. This claim is legitimate, it seems to me; as a general rule, when men raise their voices at women, there is an evocation of a pre-existing power dynamic which I want to avoid. And as a feminist, I think it's important that I keep this power dynamic in mind when arguing with anybody--and 'anybody' includes a lover--and to recognize and subvert it whenever I can. But having to keep this in mind in the face of being yelled at by a lover can be an extremely difficult thing to do--keeping myself from raising my voice is one thing; keeping myself from responding in kind to somebody to whom I am vulnerable in the intimate way that a lover can be, is really hard to do. Worth the effort, I think, but still difficult.

Another example: My politics, to the degree that they include queer theory (and to some degree feminism in general), make me sort of predisposed to like queer/queer-minded women--and that includes romantically. Sadly, the number of queer and queer-minded women who might like dating a man (even a feminist man) can seem at times to be vanishingly small. Yeah, yeah, more whining about how I can't find love because I'm so darn progressive. It's sort of self-serving and self-congradulatory. Still, it is sometimes how I feel. (And, actually, I doubt that the number of femnist women who want to date feminist men is vanishingly small--more likely the general ways that I meet people just don't lead to meeting queer-minded women who like men like myself.) To the extent that my politics shape who I'm attracted to romantically and sexually, and to the degree that my politics are feminist and queer-friendsly, it feels like I'm limiting my chances of finding love, romance and/or sex in a very real way.

Politics and Getting Some
So all of this can get incredibly complex for me to think about, much less for me to live through. But then it occurred to me, that mixed up in all of this was something that is on the surface a wee little bit simpler to think about, but maybe just as important: How my sex life is tied up with my politics, and how my political bent has made my sex life itself, as well as my relationship to sex and to my lovers more complex.

Disclaimer: Pretty much everything that follows is based upon generalizations, almost all of which have exceptions, even in my own specific examples. That is, when I talk about 'lovers' who are into x,y and z, it's a certainty that there are exceptions. So if any of y'all know any of my lovers, or think you do, or want to, keep in mind that any generalization I make here might not apply to any particular individual.

As I have worked on this post over a couple of days, the more I think about how my feminism and my sex life come together (no pun intended), the less I think that it actually is any simpler than, say, how feminism affects my lovelife in general. Part of that is because sex and romance are intextricably intertwined, I think--at least they are for me. But part of it is that the intricacies of feminism and sex are myriad. I'm not going to try to address them all. I'm going to focus on one in particular.

First off, there's what I'll call, for want of a more precise phrase, the expressed 'desire for a dom' that my lovers have routinely suprised me with. I recognize that there are several technical ways that those in the BDSM community use the term 'dom', and that I'm likely misusing it here. I'm going to use it as a blanket term to cover a general feel for the power relationships that my sexual relationships have seemed to default to. The way it works is this: From the very start, though I am shy and often slow-moving when it comes to sex, I am often the initiator. This goes for the first kiss all the way down to the first roleplay. It's not that simple, of course, because there is never (one hopes) just one initiator. Rather, the move into sex is as layered as sexual attraction can be, and all involved usually are initiating things--maybe some more obviously than others. But the fact still remains that I seem to run into a standard expectation that I be the initiator--at the very least--and the dom a good deal of the time.

Of course, it's not the case that only men can be doms. And it's not simply the case that dominating somebody sexually is being more 'masculine' in some way. But, of course, the whole dom/sub dynamic, in its myriad forms, doesn't take place outside of culture. It is informed by sexism, by feminism, and, in my case, by my personal views of masculinity. That so many of my sexual relationships have felt one-sided in this way isn't that strange, I suppose. In a way, it's just an extension of ways that our gender roles affect our interactions--it's still the case that men are more often expected to ask women out than vice-versa (I wonder if it's the case that butch women are more often expected to ask femme women out?). That men are more often expected to be the initiator sexually sort of grows right out of that, if we let it. And then, if dom/sub roles come into play at all, it's not suprising that we can easily attatch some gender roles to them as well. It seems to me that even when men are subs and women are dommes, there is something going on with genderfucking there--it is hot for all involved partly because it flies in the face of the norms of gender roles.

Enough About You, Let's Talk About Me
Which brings me sort of back to my relationship to being the initiator and/or dominant sexually. I'm happy and thankful that a lover in my early sexual life with other people (which, ahem, wasn't as early, really, as my sexual life with myself!) taught me that the standards which I had created for myself regarding sex with women--egalitarianism in all things, processing, not being demanding, not assuming anything (I was always the guy who asked a woman I was attracted to if I could kiss her)--while important, ought to sometimes be thrown out the window. And not only after processing it all. Sometimes, she explained, a woman likes to be kissed without the asking part. Don't men? And I'm talking about kissing here, but of course there was more to it than that. And, thankfully, she was willing to show me about the 'more to it than that' stuff as well.

But this was also, in a way, the beginnings of some of my confusion about sexuality, gender, feminism and masculinity. Because, in a simplistic way, what she was helping me to understand is that she wanted a thoughtful, respectful, feminist guy--but she also wanted him to slide right into what I see as a stereotypically negative gender role: The man who takes what he wants and cares only about himself; the man who is in control, who needs to be in control; the man that I desperately do not want to be.

Again, all of this is oversimplifying. There are all sorts of nuances that I'm not delving into. And it may be that within the nuances I'll find some solace. But as it stands, I am frustrated by my inability to navigate this stuff emotionally, and to find lovers who will navigate it with me long-term. I know that the may exist--I've had a taste of lovers who will navigate this stuff with me, as I will navigate the other side(s) of the issues with them. But I think it's rare, and it's not the sort of thing that one can really figure out alone, I think...

More later.
Filed under:Feminism, Masculinities and Therapy.