How BDSM is and is not sexist

Back in October I tried to write a bit about sexism within BDSM, but my brain was way too mushy to articulate the problem coherently. However while catching up on some long overdue blog reading yesterday, I found this thoughtful, intelligent post over at Subversive Submissive that spelled it out in more detail.

From my perspective, BDSM is a product of human sexuality and its wide variety of expressions and is not inherently sexist nor inherently feminist. Because we live in a sexist and heterosexist society, we mainly see maledom-femsub parings, while any other combinations, including those involving trans and queer folks, are marginalized; and female dominants are largely still expected to be fetish objects for submissive men. (Or they aren’t really thought to exist.) Also because of the sexist culture in which we are socialized, there are a lot of men (in general) who are accustomed to getting what they want from women, and there are a lot of women (in general) who have a hard time saying “no” and sticking to it

I particularly liked the point about how BDSM pairings that do not fall within the traditional maledom-femsub paradigm are marginalized as I think this is why any discussion of, say, domestic discipline is always, always gendered even if many of us who engage in the practice do not look at it in terms of gender. She also talks about how BDSM practice can be used to mask sexist beliefs, as in male dominants who believe that all women are naturally submissive regardless of whether a woman may identify as dominant (I think we've all run into that guy). It's a really great post and I highly recommend reading it in its entirety (it's not particularly long).