Look, Bondage Blog is very one-sided. Our motto is “taking pleasure in the beauty of restrained women” and 99% of all posts are about M/f, male-dominant, female-submissive BDSM of one kind or another. The reason? Because that’s what I like. (And you don’t run a blog for as many years as this without trailing off into nothingness and oblivion if you don’t like your subject matter.)
But one trend in BDSM “thinking” that I try to avoid promoting is the school of thought that John Norman and his Goreans took to the extreme — that idea that women are “naturally” submissive and men are “naturally” dominant. As near as I can tell, it’s highly individual to the person, and I don’t have any population data. Do there seem to be more dominant men and submissive women in the populations I’m familiar with? Yeah, but my info is a collection of anecdotes, there’s selection bias issues out the ass, and even if the raw numbers could be proved out that way, it still wouldn’t tell us anything about human nature because of the compounding (and in this case, surely overwhelming) variables of culture.
So you’ll see lots of “Here’s so and so, she’s pretty in chains” from me, but not so much of the “I am Man, thus I am Master, hear my dick roar” bullshit.
Why mention this now? Because I just stumbled over Calico’s blog (previous Bondage Blog posts featuring Calico are here, here, and here) and found her saying this on the subject:
So you may have noticed I play submissive to men. Lately I am trying to own it more.
But I don’t, in any way, think men are “more dominant” than women.
I believe that if we got over our cultural baggage, we would have as many dominant women as we have dominant men. I believe that women wouldn’t grow up quashing their inclinations as unfeminine and unattractive, molding their passions into “feminine” channels, feeling isolated and wrong, or assuming they must be butch, queer or even men. (Not that there is anything wrong with being those things, if you want to be.)