LiP | Feature | On My Knees: On Being a Monogamous Slut and a Feminist Submissive

Mona West is the pseudonym for a widely-published, Boston-based writer and editor. Email her here.

r e l a t e d
o u t p o s t s

sexuality.org
Therapist William A. Henkin's take on submission and
feminism, and Dr. Henkin's argument that the more power you have, the more erotic your submission can be.

BDSM and Feminism
The feisty perspectives of a het, feminist dom.

National Organization for Women
They've changed their hardline tune about S/M, but not too long ago, they argued that "sadomasochists seek to legitimize and provide a premeditated structure for violence." Read more about the debate within NOW at Submissive and Feminist: Contradition or Consistency?"

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

From
LiP Magazine
[www.lipmagazine.org]

Media Dissidence &
Uncivil Discourse
Since 1996

by Mona West
04.15.02

to know about me.

I am the type of woman who doesn't allow herself, or anyone around me, to be fucked with.

Men who talk to me disrespectfully in public should expect to be treated poorly. Everyone else, on the other hand, gets treated with the baseline respect I accord all of my fellow human beings, unless a person's agenda happens to include malicious intent, misogyny, homophobia or racism.

The woman I am today is an educated, self-possessed feminist who knows that my rights in this society have been hard won, at great cost to those who paved the way.

I know that women deserve good sex, attentive lovers, and the resources and tools to make our sex lives safe and fulfilling. I know that what goes on in our bedrooms should not define who and what we are. And I know that creating an identity largely centered around sexual practice belies a dearth of grounding in our society, whether spiritual or cultural in nature. Rather than being the defining aspect of one's own identity or personality, sex should have its rightful place in the pantheon of human experience.

All that said, here's what gets me off.

I like being ordered to my knees and to be told to take my partner's cock out of his pants.

I enjoy making eye contact while listening to his rhythms and groans and, above all, obeying his commandments when I've got his sizable cock buried deep in my throat.

I love being told I'm a nasty slut, a dirty whore or a good girl.

On my knees, or in any number of other submissive permutations and positions, I'm trading one form of personal power for another form of sexual power—a feeling that I'd be hard-pressed to surpass through any other avenues.

For me, there's an emancipatory release in relinquishing my physical power in the presence of someone whose knowledge of my sexual psyche is so thorough, so loving, and so complete that he fills all the holes—virtually and physically—that I need to have filled by the person I've decided I want to spend my life with. In being told to use my tongue a certain way, to suck his heavy balls, and to swallow the length of his shaft so deep that he can see my eyes water from the effort, I'm honestly being the kind of slut I love to be.

Only here, in my partner's presence, it's both safe and stimulating, and it's the sauciest, sassiest possible expression of my love for him. The fact that his dominant tendencies are so well suited to my submissive ones just sweetens the experience for both of us.

But in this relationship, unlike numerous earlier ones that served to negate and subjugate my needs to the whims of others, I define what I want, how I want it, and what it means for me.

With those cues and desires firmly expressed, I can give it over to my partner's capable hands, bend over, and enjoy the kind of mind-blowing ass rimming and fucking that leaves me panting, growling, and uttering one nasty expletive after another.

I enjoy my pleasure, his pleasure, our pleasure, and everything we are together. It's here, with him, that I know that there's room to head off in any direction we want.

In our personal space, there is fluidity in our sex play, and there are very few taboos. If, in an occasional reversal of roles, I want to slap the side of his face playfully before sitting on it, I've got nothing to worry about. And if I want to paint his lips with dark brown lipstick so that I can admire his shimmering smile when I get between his legs and suck him off, I've got license to do so.

And if I want nothing more than a slow, loving, face-to-face, missionary-style fuck, sans gagging, choking, spanking or shoving, that's mine to be had.

I've gotten my freak on, and it feels damn good. The way I look at it, it only gets better from here.

Yet even in this context, sexual submission is something that most of my fellow feminists seem to neither understand nor respect.

Can I really blame them? In a world filled with hateful, violently sexual imagery and the non-stop denigration of women in advertising and cinema, my submissive proclivities for being spanked, flogged and bossed around are hardly the kinds of things I'd allude to—even obliquely—in mixed company.

Because to those whose tastes run on the paler side of "egalitarian" vanilla sex, male-female/dominant-submissive sex play can seem problematic, even dangerous. On its face, it can be viewed as perverse mimicry of the patriarchal, societally-condoned sexual roles to which men and women have been consigned for centuries.

Admittedly, then, there is an aspect to the way I play, sexually, that mimics and then usurps those very roles that I first absorbed, struggled with, and then batted down.

As a teenager, for instance, I reacted to years of emotional and sexual abuse and the relentless sexual harassment from young classmates—of both genders—by becoming promiscuous.

As my drug and alcohol use accelerated, so did my sluttiness. By the time I turned eighteen, I had had many dozens of sexual partners, contracted a number of STDs, and recognized the ease and immediacy with which most teenage boys and men gravitate toward anyone willing to put out.

My sluttiness dropped off around the same time I won my own, physical independence from my family. A series of increasingly stable, supportive monogamous relationships bolstered my confidence in forging a healthier, more empowering sex life for myself.

But as the years went on, a strange thing happened. I found myself in the middle of sex play, being consumed with the desire to be dominated and, on occasion, to dominate. As I got happier and more balanced in my own personal and professional life, my urges to be pushed around, pinned down, spanked, slapped and loved in a kind of primal way also grew more prominent.

But most men couldn't hang with it. Some made half-hearted attempts at satisfying my desires, while others pushed them away altogether. For all the alpha males out there, few seemed totally comfortable with my need to have my darker forces toyed with and beaten happily into submission.

These darker forces are likely the ones that fundamentalist Christians, among others with a puritanical bent, would be eager to characterized as "evil urges." In no other realm of human experience are fundamentalists of all stripes more eager to attribute behavior to satanic or malevolent urges than in the realm of sexuality.

I'm hardly alone in understanding such dark forces as expression of the chaotic creative energy that needs to be channeled in every man, woman and child. And for me, that channeling often takes the form of wanting to have vigorous anal sex or wear my favorite collar and leash.

I realize that I'm playing, in exaggerated fashion, with the garbage I've had to consume and struggle with most of my life.

I've wrapped myself in the cloth of my assigned gender and sexual roles, and set about ripping, tearing and cutting holes in what I've been handed. I've taken in, reshaped and reassembled it all until it fits.

I wear it well. And if it suits me best when I'm on my knees, then I'm happy for it. I'll take it, suck it, swallow it and, submissively, make it all mine.