Published at: http://polytical.org/activism/community/4-revising-feminist-relationships.html

I'm beginning with the premise that relationships, not just individuals, can be feminist. My housemate points out that what I mean could also be termed 'anarchist'. Well, here I go.

How can a sexual relationship be feminist? My first response: by fucking with roles.

If we're considering a scenario in which just two people are having sex with one other in private, there is always (although I probably shouldn't say 'always') going to be one person who's a bit more active, and one person a little more receptive. Simultaneous reciprocity is sometimes touted, however, as the holy grail, especially in pseudo-feminist conversations. You know, the appealing sounding goal of joyous synchronicity, total dissolution, unity ... it smells so much like equality. Well, I never thought I'd say this, but I don't buy it. I think the feelings attached to simultaneous reciprocity are real, but they're produced in part to mask our discomfort about the fact that someone might be doing more of the work, and someone else just 'taking it'. It extends in the imagination well beyond the arena of penetration and anxieties about penis hegemony. It is however a feminist complex with its roots in separatist-feminist concerns about all sex with men. It's quite a straight complex. Gay women, and gay men, don't share it: it's understood widely in LGBT circles that there's a give and take; a give and take that probably alternates – or is static but defined in such a way as to be mutually satisfactory.

 

I want to speak up next for BDSM, as lived in any sexual orientation or number of participants; but especially of heterosexual couples, because BDSM provides wonderful scope for transcending the aforementioned discomfort about simultaneous reciprocity. How can a relationship be feminist? By queering up the boundaries of the roles our bodies seem to suggest we should inhabit, and (adding answer#2) by playing around with pain and power. Theorists for kinky sex scenes have argued that, far from fetishising the world's oppressive dynamics in private life, BDSM practices (at least, enlightened ones) have the potential to heal the violence and subjugation we experience outside the bedroom, at the hands of the state. The Oxford-based activist collective Radical X http://radicalx.ox4.org/playfight has just brought out a brilliant 'zine that bravely posits the potential for kink to be liberatory, therapeutic, and creatively cathected with activism: in one testimony, the ethical pervert reasons thus: The police may confine or hurt your body without your consent, but submitting willingly to your partner's beatings, later, restores you to power because it proffers something the armed wing of unjust government can never have.

Beyond 'dom' and 'sub', 's' and 'm', furthermore, BDSM demands 'trusting' 'professional' 'vulnerable' 'brave' - lots of un-exotic sounding things. The one thing you can never queer up is 'respect', even, needless to say, when you're spanking and spitting on your beautiful pig-fuck-slut-toy-saint or making him take one of your shiny new cocks, or whatever. That's in fact because respect is queer already; etymologically, respect is de-objectifying, about looking back at yourself through the other. By shedding the goal of equality, paradoxically, bdsm pretty much gets there. See yourself in the slave, the slut, the master, the whore, the queen... expand your horizons. Surrender, resist, test, trust. It's a cliché, but submissives are in charge (or just as much 'in charge' as their keeper is). Compare that to the more or less thinly veiled submersion of protection or guardianship dynamics within conventional relationships. Where kinky relationships have the subjective distance of spectacle, embodying performative acts through respect – that is to say, touching on introspection – conventional heteronormative relationships lapse into limiting, essentialising and non-fun behaviours … through consent that is merely tacit.

Moreover, by caricaturing taboos, BDSM enables the expression (and catharsis) not merely of humiliation/rape/punishment/torture, but of all sorts of roles: animal, baby, lunatic. Because BDSM is truly switchable, unlike conventional vanilla sex, it can open up a new horizon for feminists of all genders. Unfortunately, the state isn't very happy with people enjoying the dismantling and parodying of violence. Since 26th January 2009 it has been illegal for anyone in England and Wales to possess an “extreme” image, even if the activity itself is legal. I'd welcome thoughts as to the rationale behind this legislation, because, if designed to protect women, no study of harmful violence within BDSM communities could possibly back it up. A majority of visitors to the core BDSM mixed porn and erotic literature websites in Europe and the US are apparently female.

Uneasiness amongst feminists, especially with regard to practices involving a female submissive, is superficially understandable, but fundamentally misdirected at BDSM instead of at BAD SEX (some of which is of course “kinky” as well as sad). Comrades, bad sex is the enemy, not power play; power play can – at least conceivably – set us free. An anonymous poem in the zine I mentioned runs simply: “There are three things I want to have / Your voice, your stance, your desire /I need not ask. You will give them freely./ I will take them by force.” I don't know about you, but I think that's damn hot. Because it's playful, and because it intelligently subverts the liberal taboo on eroticising violence, and most of all because it is crystal clear about consent.

Obviously one cannot fuck the revolution into being, but there must, I contend, be something of the revolution in our fucking. A fluid, imaginative, all-out, queer, utopian approach to bondage, domination, sadism, perversion, and masochism, might be a good way of achieving that. Inter alia.

Right. How can a sexual relationship be feminist? My third response: by fucking with structures. The dictionary, and most of us, conceptualise a relationship as a two-way thing. The OED on the word relationship, n. offers: "A connection formed between two or more people or groups based on social interactions and mutual goals, interests, or feelings." Two or more people. Or groups. With mutual goals, interests, or feelings. Isn't that interesting? It sounds like a polyamorous idyll, really. However: the bastion of standards also adds immediately: "spec, an emotional and sexual association or partnership between two people." Specifically. OK. The point of going into semantics about the term "relationship" in this way is the way the forced illusion of exclusivity dogs us, intellectually and spiritually. Like the dictionary's worldview, so many of us are capable of common sense idealism, yet pin ourselves down with convention.

As long as it's a friendship, we are all happy to be “in a relationship” with a friend-of-a-friend, and many would probably phrase it that way in conversation: 'I know X through Y', an acknowledgement of the mutuality of interest and feeling binding you, through Y, to X. But when it comes to sex, and love, we find it so much harder. Exclusivity is still an illusion here. It's not a thing to be sad about, or to call me cynical for noticing. If your libido's active, you engage with sexual and romantic interest with people around you; more importantly, why shouldn't you? Many of my comrades, following Emma Goldman's writings, among others, wish to impose no normative demands and constraints on their loved ones: only love, solidarity, goodwill, and support of their endeavours. It's bloody hard, obviously, but isn't it a noble ideal, even if you only ever get to shuffle a little closer to it?

Polyamory, as one friend wrote in response to a joyous outpouring from me, is no less, and possibly more, prone to painful episodes than are other conventions. Jo reminded me that the perspective we have on relationships is extensively determined by the state of bliss or woe one inhabits at the time of analysis. “Even across (maybe especially across) polyamorous webs, hearts spin out of control of heads and fucking hurts. But I have no desire to mount a binary opposition to this - quite obviously it works for some people, for others the pain inherent in the ideal is too much.” Couplings aren't only patriarchal, and that, ultimately, is the note upon which I wish to end. My dear Jo, who is mending her broken heart, says that “disallowing the submersion of destructive power structures is what its all about, from sex with one other to sex with the whole world (which is sort of what Quakerism is about, touching without bodies, only soul to soul).” 

But before I conclude, I want to point out that even across time, we reject our relationality with individuals who love - or have loved - and fuck - or have fucked - our partners; people who reproduce or once reproduced our goals, interests and feelings. It seems 'natural' to many to erase these people completely from discourse within the relationship. Of course, jealousy enters into intense friendships (too), copying the model of romance that constructs an ego issue around degrees of emotional pluralism, and a zero-sum economics of the heart. As Rihanna sings on the radio today, 'I want you to make me feel like I'm the only girl in the world, the only one that you'll ever love' – and the only girl that has ever been. Don't talk to me about people you once loved … even if some of the most interesting threads of your being glitter therein. Weird, isn't it?

Since time immemorial, masculinity has fretted about whether the sperm inside a woman's body might be mixing with someone else's (I mean, 'cos, that would be pretty much gay). Trading and exchanging women through kinship and exchange systems used to contain this anxiety somewhat. The anxiety lives on. And obviously women worry about where their darling's cock has been ... but intuitively, I would say that that feminine anxiety and attachment is a mirroring of the masculine original.

Women are generally good, I think, at savouring relationships for what they are in themselves. That's what we want to hang on to – Jo's idea of communion, beyond bodies. Relationships require giving and taking and loving that which others have come before to give and take, and will continue to give and take in times to come. Let's emphasise this, at the expense of normative framings that involve the toxic/gothic totality of two people's destiny, Romeo and Juliet style, merged with trappings of status, networking, trophy-ism, manipulation, display, and so on. Back in the day, chivalry and romance narratives stepped in to sweeten the pill of exogamous exchange and make girls OK with being fobbed off by daddy to be someone else's chattel. And the con has been massively successful. Monogamous thinking has been internalised by almost all the damsels in the tower: “oh. I suppose the only way for it to be true love is for it to be the only love. Apart from daddy of course”.

Well, I think a damsel is just as desirable if, as I climb over the parapet, she happens to be having a post-coital cigarette with the old crone. And hopefully I am just as desirable, and valuable, and trustworthy, to her, if I am a knight who loves someone else as well.

That said, feeling like there's no one else in the world is nice – it can be a phase, which other stakeholders should probably know about, or it can be a transitory experience, readily repeatable during the throes of an ecstatic fuck. It's not a sane or reasonable measure of attachment. In fact, other people existing in your partner's world often lends the relationship wholly desirable characteristics: perhaps a certain groundedness, a sensitivity, a sense of active engagement, thoughtfulness, flux, and preciousness. Which leads me to a principle some will be surprised to hear invoked by a polyamorist.

How can a relationship be feminist? My fourth and last response: by being faithful. Polyamory is not promiscuity. Some supposedly revolutionary individuals, often straight men, throughout the history of radical politics, jumped on the bandwagon of free-love ideals to justify rampant and hurtful sexual behaviours towards others. These were 'free love misogynists', indistinguishable from common-or-garden heteronormative dick-heads. What they repudiate (commitment, openness, communicative integrity) is what poly families embrace by being faithful. Needless to say, I don't mean faithful in the sense of 'loyal, exclusive'. Within the web of a polyamorous relationship, which will often have primary and secondary commitments within it, faithfulness to the spirit of generous, mutual, supportive and non-possessive love is pretty damn paramount. (And needless to say, safe sex is a must.) Speaking properly about feelings, honouring contracts, and all sorts of boring and almost administrative things might be necessary to make it work. It all depends on whether you think the ideal is worth it.

I'm not saying polyamory is the only way of having feminist – that is to say anarchist – relationships, although I suppose I am saying there's something artificial, unambitious, and (crucially) vestigially patriarchal about the heterosexual edifice called One True Love (TM) and the expectation of reproductively oriented marriage that comes with it. A disclaimer: many people quite naturally love one another non-possessively, and don't go around posturing and preaching as "polyamorists": blessed be they. Good night.

Sophielle