“So”, says a friend of mine who has a FetLife account, “I gather that there are specific different sexual activities that are part of what you call being a gender invert. Yeah, I know there’s probably more to your gender identity thing than how you like to get it on, but essentially you’re saying you want to be the girl and your female partner be the boy, right? So how is that different from female dominant and male submissive play in the kink world? Because that’s out there. You can find that for sure.”
Good question. I have in fact approached it from that angle. Be kind of silly not to.
I don’t consider my gender identity to be a sexual perversion, and like many other people in the LGBTQ world I have resented any inclination to treat my difference as a sickness, deviance, depravity, a twisted distortion of natural sexual and gender expression, you know?
But the kink world is inhabited by people whose attitude is generally “Oh, they call you a pervert? Well, welcome, we’re all perverts in here, you can’t freak us out and we’re tolerant about everything as long as it’s consensual. And we like to talk about it and learn stuff from each other”. So, again like many other people in the LGBTQ categories, I have found the kink world to be a warmer and better listening social space than society at large tends to be.
So, yes. Fetlife has Groups, much like Facebook does, and in the group titled GenderQueer I created a thread titled “YOU be the boy and let ME be the girl…” and wrote up a description and asked who else considered their genderqueerness to include or consist of that. Didn’t get many responses but it may have been a victim of bad timing (I posted it during the holidays). FetLife also has lists of Fetishes which are more like interests you can associate your profile with rather than groups you join, and I may try listing this as a Fetish.
I am surprised that it isn’t more openly and commonly embraced as a specific kink, sure enough. That, specifically that: female people who want to be the boy and male people who want to be the girl, connecting for that purpose.
But oh yes there are indeed fem doms available for liaisons with subby males and whoo boy is there ever a market for them! I have a partner I’ve been involved with for seven years who identifies as a switch (meaning she can relate to people as either a dominant or as a submissive), as do I. She also has a FetLife account. The correspondence she tends to get the most of is a never-ending series of males asking if she will top them for a play session or two, or would be open to taking them on as a submissive. Even guys who list themselves as dominants have written to say that they want to experience subbing to a dominant woman!
Eventually one wonders if we mean the same things when we throw terms and phrases out there. We don’t always. I’ve found that people misconstrue me both within and outside the various specialized communities of kink and LGBTQ people, and I’ve enthusiastically jumped into groups and conversations only to find out that I’ve misconstrued what others meant, as well.
A straight (non-LGBTQ / non-kink) message board I’m a regular on is popular enough to have a shadow board or two where people post to make fun of some of the more pretentious posters and sillier posts on the main board. Being a pretentiously self-important type myself, I sometimes get targeted. When I once posted that my partner tops me, and that her topping me is a specific characteristic of our relationship, some folks on a shadow board said they needed brain bleach and said it was more information than they wanted to know. Reading on, and reading between the lines a bit, I finally realized they probably thought she was donning a strap-on and having anal sex with me. In other words, that that’s what topping meant to them, being the penetrator.
People in the audience of a discussion I was leading asked questions about posture and back problems that eventually led me to realize they assumed that in any such relationship the woman was always on top, straddling him. That does make a certain amount of sense, topping meaning to be on top, I suppose. And implicit within that, that to be on top is to dominate and control the sexual experience.
Back in 1991-1992, when my academic journal article “Same Door Different Closet” was being peer-reviewed prior to publication, one of the reviewers asked me to be more explicit within the article about whether I was suggesting that such relationships would never involve penis-in-vagina sex, apparently under the Dworkinesque assumption that PIV sex is incompatible with anything but male dominance.
The kink community has Groups and Fetish interests with “sissy” in the title, and since one of my many forays into self-labeling was to call myself a sissy and to speak of sissyhood, I dove in and got into conversations with the sissy males of the fetish community. What I found was that most of the participants get an emotional and erotic charge from being feminized by their fem dom mistresses. “She made me wear panties to the office and when I got home she made me wear a frilly French maid apron and skirt, it was SO hotttt!” For most of them there is a distinct erotic element of humiliation. Some of the humiliation comes from being feminized as a startling violation of their normative male persona, being made to wear feminine apparel. Some comes from the power difference associated with the gender difference: she humiliates him by making him her bitch, underlining his demotion in power and her dominance of him by placing him in a girl position.
The kink community also has the generic D/s relationship in which the dominant happens to be female, and the submissive, male; and as I said before, there’s sort of a waiting list for males who wish to sub, a lot of demand for female doms. What is eroticized here, as with the more common male dom / female sub relationship, is the power imbalance, of controlling or being controlled, and also of serving or of being served. The BDSM community has an intensified version of that as well, the master-slave relationship. Although all of this takes place in the larger context of consensual arrangements and consensual play between competent adult people, what is being played WITH is the erotic possibilities of power inequality, of one person taking license to do unto another and the other person being done unto.
All of these varying interpretations of gender inversion have left me repeating my usual refrain: “that’s not it; that’s still not it”.
What I seek from “YOU be the boy and let ME be the girl” isn’t humiliation or the shock of sudden power-relationship inversion, and it isn’t the eroticization of atypical power imbalance either. I have always been, and am always, a girlish person and I don’t find it in any shape way fashion or form LESS THAN. I’m proud of it. I respect girls and women and don’t consider THEM lesser, quite the contrary. I am mostly a very egalitarian person, and ponderously serious about it for the most part. Power between the sexes is complicated and multifaceted, but when I contemplate being with female people and I wish for equality, the form that that wish takes is most centrally the wish that I not be deprived of the powers and privileges that female people have, both within sexual liaisons and within relationships, and during initial courting and flirting and negotiations for any and all of that to occur. There are other powers that the male person generally tends to have in all of these contexts, so don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the female role is the one in which all power is secretly vested despite all myths to the contrary. What I will say is that the specific set that DO generally get vested in and as part of the female role are the ones most appealing to me, and which fit my personality.
As I said in passing, I identify in the kink world as a switch. Similarly, in the universe of courting and dating and flirting and coupling and conducting an ongoing relationship, I do not require that I get to be “the girl”, I’m willing to do egalitarian arrangements in which we take turns, or conduct ourselves as “two girls involved with each other”. What I don’t want to be is “the boy” in any of those scenarios.
“You can’t seduce the willing; that’s why women with the inclination to do what you’re talking about don’t pursue men to do it with”, say some. “I understand what you want, but I don’t see how you’re going to find people to chase you by running away from them”, say others.
The kink-world appears to be an exceptional preserve, a land of explicit negotiations where atypical is, by definition, normative, and where anything (at least anything ultimately consensual) goes. But while there is a plentitude of male people identifying as submissives (many of them adorned with collars and others aspiring to being collared), there is a dearth of sightings of male submissives being pounced upon by sexually aggressive female dominants.
When males in the kink world indicate that they are feminines or embrace a girl role, they seldom mean that they view themselves as more invested in the desire to form an ongoing relationship than in immediate eroticism. They seldom mean that their interaction with interested women (and/or female people otherwise gendered) is primarily reactive and responsive to expressions of interest by the other party — hence the constant mating calls of “do me” submissive males offering themselves hopefully to female dominants. They do not typically consider themselves in any way less the origin of carnality and explicit sexual desires than those they expect to become involved with, hence their often extremely specific requests for what activities they hope to experience (“you use a whip on me and make me beg… you sit on a chair and make me lick you until you come…you step on me with high heels and grind the heel points into me and call me pathetic”, etc etc).
As my beforementioned partner has often written back or said to subby guys at parties, “I’m the dom. It’s not about what YOU want if I’m the dom. I get to decide what I want to do to you.”
In the long run, too much of what I’m about and what I’m after in life as a gender invert doesn’t easily detach, as an isolated erotic activity, from my desire to be understood as this sort of person who is like this 24 x 7 and not just in the dungeon or between the bedroom sheets. That still doesn’t rule out the kink community or its events as opportunities to meet relevant people, but the kinky world is still pretty gender-typical and its definition of what is sex and what is erotic is drawn mostly from conventional male-sexuality notions of sex, and it’s not quite a refuge for the gender inverted.
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This is a repost of a blog post. OK’d with the mods in advance.
