Courtesy of: The Conversation & Lauren Rosewarne (Senior Lecturer at University of Melbourne)
"The poster for Secretary is up on my wall at work. I
actually paid to see A Dangerous Method purely for Jung’s novel approach to
therapy (and God do I hate period films.) While I probably won’t read all of
Fifty Shades of Grey, I’ve certainly read the dirty bits.
No surprises: spanking has long been on my mind.
Journalist Katie Roiphe recently offered her take, writing
in Newsweek about an apparent surge of reddened rears in pop culture. Roiphe
proposes that while the spanked-into-subordination fantasy is nothing new, its
contemporary popularity reflects women’s burgeoning power. Power in the
workplace, power in the bedroom. Apparently we ladies are a little
nostalgically misty for those heydays of patriarchy so we’re reminiscing
through bedroom oppression.
While many sex-positive feminists have criticised Roiphe for
overlooking women’s own sexual agency and for peddling an unsubstantiated
thesis about women’s dissatisfaction with power, I kinda think she makes some
valid points.
A high-flying businessman will occasionally pay for a
whippin’ purely because he can. Because everything goes back to normal the
second he groans out the safeword. Women, who might normally feel powerful and
authoritative, similarly have the luxury of obtaining through sex the thrills
that life fortunately rarely proffers.
Such ideas, after all, underpin some of most popular
products of the sex industry.
Through porn, people can watch the dirty, messy, ugly and
quite possibly illegal sex that they would never have in real life, enjoying it
vicariously to avoid the stench and arrest and the identity crisis. Other
people readily purchase the services of sex workers to help play out their
fantasies – be it infantilism or bondage or degradation – purely for the
novelty. They’re not infants, they’re not normally tied to bedposts or made to
feel degraded or undesirable, but sometimes there’s appeal in sampling the
unfamiliar. Particularly when they can be eroticised, savoured and then escaped
at will.
Of course, I’m actually not interested in writing a defence
of Roiphe. My interest instead, is offering alternate ways of interpreting the
paddling penchant. I’m proposing that intimacy and consumer culture as two
equally valid interpretations.
One of my favourite quotes about women’s sexual fantasies
centred on the rape dream. Molly Haskell, writing for Ms magazine in the 1970s,
claimed that women don’t really desire rape in the sex-without-consent sense,
rather, their yen is more akin to “when Robert Redford can’t take no for an
answer”.
It’s about being wanted, obsessively, by someone with a
“just-you-try-and-stop-me” look in their eye. Context, negotiated parameters
and the deliberate orchestration explains the appeal of the firm hand. The
drawcard is being wanted in ways that aren’t rational, that aren’t necessarily
romantic. The attraction lies in being with a partner who you trust enough to
have sex with in ways which might conflict with your morals or politics or
sense of propriety. The seductive stems from being spanked by a lover who you
know won’t hit you any harder than you want it.
Instead of it being intellectualised, instead of it being
some kind of expression of, response to or rebellion against feminism,
sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar, and sometimes pleasure isn’t
analysed, isn’t political; sometimes it’s just about the orgasm. Spanking
sometimes is simply desirable because finding someone you trust enough to
express your sexuality with is rare. And madness-inducing. And intoxicating.
As pro-spanking as I am, the cynic in me also sees popular
interest being actively orchestrated by the market. We live in an age where
advertising – and pop culture broadly – persistently tells us that our lives
are boring. Compared to those thin and glossed and glamorous people looking
back at us from stage and screen, we’re fat, we’re frumpy and we are complete
and utter schmucks. The solution however, is readily purchasable as evidenced
by the procession of goods available to mend every malady. Sex is not immune to
this and kinky, props-laden sex is one such offering: the pitch, so it goes, is
that the whip/dog collar/pleather boots will get you better sex. Better sex, of
course, gifts a better life.
Just as we’re encouraged to constantly upgrade our
technology, just as we are taught that the dress we bought yesterday can’t sate
us nearly as much as the one we buy tomorrow, the same consumerist messages
about sex are feverishly peddled. Everyone else is having it better, raunchier,
kinkier, with far more screeching-heights-of-ecstasy than we are. In response,
we should feel perpetually dissatisfied with our partner and seek out newer,
slicker, sexier options, alternatively spice things up the way magazines urge
us. With toys, with porn, with someone else’s expression of an excitement.
For every woman who gets a heady thrill from the
pleasure/pain frisson of a wallop, there’s another who’s doing it because she’s
been sold the idea that it’s what’s necessary to keep things spicy, to keep her
man, to stop him for straying. While embracing the spank, the role of the
market shouldn’t be ignored.
No fantasy can be narrowed to any one specific motivation.
Just as fantasies with one partner might be completely unthinkable with the
next, our interests in sex, in spanking, are personal, temporal and fluctuate
with every gasp, every heartbeat and every thwack."
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