Female Sexuality Has A Male Voice.

When I was growing up, female sexuality had a male voice. Hell, I’m still growing up and it still has a male voice. I don’t just mean that in terms of depiction, although, female characters, even in first person are often written with a man’s understanding of the depth of a woman. Have you ever read Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe? No offense to Daniel, I actually enjoy his work, but on every page of that book, all I could think was: This woman was clearly written by a man. That’s true of Roxana too. It’s a fascinating insight, but ultimately, it’s all too visible that the apologetic and brazen depiction of “corrupted” womanhood, is fantastical at best, and damaging at worst. To say nothing of how female characters are written in most erotica, it’s all boob and the “unleashing” of female sexuality that’s been buried, and all of it comes out in seemingly identical ways and ends in several exhausting orgasms. Perhaps that is the ultimate male fantasy, that they’d be able to make women come with such ease and at the drop of a hat.

But that’s not what I meant.

I’ve always been aggressively aware of what works for me. It was never something I considered doing without, even back when I didn’t fully understand why every belt I saw made my heart flutter or why every masturbatory fantasy I had began with being hit in the face and ended with being passing out from the violence, I didn’t consider not going out and getting exactly what I fucking wanted. I didn’t know how, and I didn’t always do it wisely, but living a sexuality that did not represent me accurately, or give me what I really needed, was out of the question. Quite frankly that did not even occur to me until I fully grew up, interacted with other people who wanted the same things and was asked how I made my peace with what I wanted sexually. I made no peace. I never saw it as an option to not get what I want, it was just who I am, and it didn’t occur to me that I could choose not to be that.

In being myself, I met many, many men. In meeting many, many men, I began to note the reflection or understanding of my sexuality through them, and one thing was common amongst most of them. They took charge of explaining my sexuality to me almost instantly. These explanations varied. The most common explanation was that I was the “wild” girl, and I did the things that their long-term girlfriends, or their wives (even the hypothetical versions of them) would refuse to do because they were upstanding members of society, and I, with my bag full of toys and my blood full of caffeine, wasn’t. Even my sexual orientation, and this happens to gay/bisexual/pansexual women all the time, appears to them to be in service of a male fantasy. The idea that two women have a relationship a real as a man a woman is still hard to grasp for a lot of people, and the casual insistence on threesomes being the only response to someone’s bisexuality lives on with pride. They had an idea of what I was — a slut, a whore, loose, easy — you can use whatever words you want, but the heart of the idea was that I was that fictional character from male-focused pornography that had come to life to fulfill all their needs. As if my sexuality existed to feed their narrative about imagined female sexuality, and that alone. It’s complicated because I am sexually submissive, and also extremely focused on the pleasure of my partners, my pleasure is a 12-step journey and nothing gets sucked to achieve it, so creating the illusion that I am a sexual fantasy menu was easy for them, and recognising that is what I was doing was difficult for me.

The other idea, and this one was firmly drilled into my brain by my previous partner, was that I was broken. His explanation for my sexual leanings to pain and control, which didn’t stop him from exploiting them at all, was that all the trauma from my life had led to me being addicted to pain, and as a result it was an act of self-loathing rooted in my brokenness. The funny thing is, he is the reason I became addicted to violence of a certain kind, but pain, I don’t remember a time in my life I didn’t long for that. The longing came way before the trauma, it came way before decent penmanship even. It didn’t matter what I said, or how expertly I demonstrated that I was not only in control of my sexual proclivities, but also that I was constantly working at understanding them better, he knew better. The possibility that as a woman my sexuality be allowed to be uninfluenced by rape and abuse, did not exist. If I wanted pain and violence, it had to mean that something was wrong with me. Something fucked up. Something dark had happened. The thing is that it’s not entirely wrong either, but there’s nuance, there are parts of my sexuality, like the part that likes being forced and craves helplessness, that are related to incidents of trauma but the relation is not so simplistic. However, a lot of men think rape fantasies come from the “freedom” the lack of consent gives a woman to really “explore” herself because she’s ashamed of her desires, and the shame evaporates when she is freed from the responsibility of them, which is problematic, and even when it is true on a case-by-case basis there is a lot more depth to that idea, and it is not necessarily linked to trauma. Just like all of my sexuality is not linked to my trauma, some of it is, but it’s not as simple as causation. In my opinion, it’s not my trauma that influenced my sexuality, it’s my sexuality that influenced how I viewed/received trauma. That discussion can never happen if the man who fucks you continues you to insist that he sees inside you, and inside you’re broken.

Fuck you and your ideas of fragile womanhood, really. That’s where another one of the narratives about female sexuality comes, especially if you are rather “out there” or “hardcore” in how you present. Evidently, deep inside you is a fragile, scared little girl. Honestly, fuck off. This is the one I get most commonly in kinky dating circles. The insistence that all of my strength, my masochism, my intensity, all of it exists only to mask something I keep buried and protected deep inside myself. Something vulnerable. Something sensitive. Something delicate. To me it seems like this idea exists only to reassure and reaffirm socially-sanctioned gender roles. Women are sensitive and delicate, so obviously one who gets off to having all of that deliciously violated must be doing so because deep inside her is a scared little creature. This one is usually followed by a promise to protect that creature, and the iteration that only the man in question can see it, and care for it. Barf. I wear my vulnerability on my sleeve, there’s no need for me to hide my humanity, neither in its strength nor in its weakness, but that’s not their contention, it’s about defining female sexuality in a way that it caters to them. To their need to perhaps nurture or protect. Or possess. Finding my vulnerability is not an explanation of my sexuality, it’s a validation of your needs within my sexuality because you cannot feel strong, unless you see weakness in me. That’s not about me, it’s about you, but it is so much of the discussion of female s-type representation in kink. Just more men, talking about what they see in women, that needs protection from them. Again, it’s okay if that is what you do want as a woman, or a person, and it’s not my place to speak for that, this is about having our needs as a group defined by a man delineating our sexualities as a shallow monolith.

In case of mine, when all else failed, the definition I got for my sexuality was that it was a reflection of my low self-worth. This one most commonly happened when someone I casually hooked up with realised I wasn’t going to hound them or fall in love with them. The Venn diagram of “commitment-phobic” men who complain about women being too “emotional” and the men who can’t handle it when a woman doesn’t want to fuck them again is a circle. All the men i fucked from within that circle needed to explain to me that my girl-wildin’ ways were a result of my low self-worth. It’s astounding how many of them fucked me before they gave me this diagnosis. Hundreds of men have told me that women cannot handle poly or open-relationships, and hundreds of men have been unable to handle that because it turned out, those things weren’t crazzzzzy sexual fantasies, but bread-and-butter realities that involved them sometimes meeting my girlfriend at my place when they picked me up, or finding another lover’s jacket casually flung over my dining chair. It was just easier to call me a slut and tell me that I would be cured someday. It’s easier to take my behaviour, dismiss that it makes you uncomfortable because of your conditioning, and represent it as a function of my poor self-worth. I don’t have a self-worth issue. Never have. There are things I examine, and refine about myself, for sure, but I don’t grade myself. I am, is enough for me.

The common element, always, between all of these approaches is that it was always men trying to take control of my sexual narrative, and explaining it back to me. That is the bedrock upon which the representation of female sexuality is built. For instance, even on here, a lot of the female characters in erotica or even journals are written by men, and some, even when written by women, are written with the male idea of the “female” roles. There are several female writers here who do a tremendous job of bringing themselves in all grit and honesty to the table, but the vast majority of female representation here fits a male (and also heterosexual) narrative. Especially when it comes to bottoms of all types (and i’m putting subs, slaves, littles, masochists) in the same box here.

It’s a game of numbers and visibility, because the heterosexual male-top, female-bottom configuration of relationships is so common, and easily digestible, it gets pushed to the top, and monopolises the conversation, and within that conversation, I see very little genuine female representation. I see a lot of stories about women, even by women, but the exploration of their roles and genders, and more importantly of their sexualities is often limited to tropes, stereotypes and pornography. I may identify as a slave, but that’s who I am in exactly one relationship, everywhere else, I’m a fucking soap-box. That’s my role. In my role as a soapbox, I take responsibility for really exploring the depth of my sexuality, and as much of sexuality in general as I can access and understand, because I am so tired of women’s images being designed by a male narrative. Women are not, deep down, fragile, broken or lacking in self-worth, those are not the things that drive out pleasure. Our quest for pleasure isn’t necessarily defined or limited by “emotion,” we can be as hard up and desperate as men or as sadistic, or as screwed up, or as dark. It’s just harder to digest because whether it comes to being Madonna or Whore, both those roles come with preset definitions, and I’m so over it, we ripped that manual up so long ago.

In interpersonal interaction the most common way men take control of the female narrative is by being an authority on it. They convince you that they know your body and your sexual mind better than you do, and before you know it, you’re parroting their teachings, and even if you’re not, they’re screaming them louder than you are. The truth is though, most women I know don’t need a man to help them discover themselves. One to explore themselves is a different thing, but seriously, we’ve been working with our equipment a long time, we don’t need your help to get answers about it.

There is a fundamental discomfort with female darkness, and it’s very easy to see for me, from my soapbox, because my writing gets a lot more backlash than male writing, and it’s not because what I write is necessarily “darker”. Some of the men I am talking about have multiple people alleging to have been violated by them, I would say that is a much, much darker connotation to have with a writer than anything I can write. I fuck around, but I don’t fuck with people’s lives, unless they’ve already demonstrated that they will violate my consent or have violated the consent of one of my friends, and then, we’re playing a game I perfected sixteen years ago and it ends with you never being able to look in a mirror again (because, darling, there is no sweet innocent girl inside me, and it’s not because she died, she never existed, some of us were born to play with the rapists). Some of them write exactly what I do, but the writing is more action-oriented than it is a female-voiced stream of consciousness. The characters are shallower, and the narrative is richer. My method is different, a lot more happens on the inside, than the outside. That’s on purpose. That’s what’s really inside a woman. I don’t speak for all women, or even half, but if I can represent even just one, I’m glad to have done it. It’s a service to female sexuality. It needs more female voices. It always did.

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