The first article by Jessica Wakeman that stuck in my head was about her reconciling her feminism with being spanked. It didn’t get the best reception, but I asked her to talk more about reconciling feminism and BDSM.
You wrote a while back about coming to terms with being aroused by spanking and being a feminist, and how you eventually reconciled the two. It was a piece that garnered a lot of criticism… but also a lot of positive comments from women who engage in that and other activities that fall loosely under the BDSM rubric and call themselves feminists. Where do you think your critics misunderstood what you were saying? How did you begin to view your place in the larger feminist community as a result of that article and the responses.
Well, the background story is that around 2005 or so, I was engaging in a lot of light BDSM play with my boyfriend at the time who had an extremely dominant personality. I’d dabbled in spanking play with guys in the past, but this time, the relationship itself had a dominant/ submissive aspect. I felt pretty ashamed and conflicted about that, because I identify as a feminist and being dominated seemed like something I wasn’t supposed to like. So, I started Googling search terms like “dominant and submissive relationships” and eventually found whole communities of women online who are in what are called “domestic discipline” relationships (sometimes called “Christian domestic discipline,” too, but definitely not all of the people who practice DD are Christians.) In DD relationships, there’s a lot of spanking punishment in the relationships, as well as spanking play during sex. A lot of women in DD relationships write blogs and I found this so fascinating that I pitched an article about it for “Bitch” magazine. I interviewed women in DD relationships who identified as feminists, including women who were pursuing graduate degrees in women’s studies, and their self-assuredness and confidence really made me feel less insecure about my own enjoyment of spanking. My article “Slap Happy” was published in Bitch in spring 2007, I believe. About a year or two later, I felt comfortable writing about my own interest in spanking play during sex for The Frisky.
I just assume spanking sex play will always be misunderstood by some people. I especially think some feminists can be doctrinaire: “X is always bad for women,” “women do this because of X,” “men do this because of X.” I read a lot of pooh-poohing online of sex acts depicted in movies or TV that are really arousing for me. For example, when clips of Casey Affleck spanking Jessica Alba in “The Killer Inside Me” were released, some women were disgusted because his character is an abuser and a murderer. I just thought, “This is only a movie and it’s a really hot sex scene!”
When it comes to women and sexuality, there’s a lot of nuances you can’t ignore and I think some feminists do so at their detriment. I wrote the spanking essay for The Frisky partially to figure it out for myself, partially to let other women who felt the same way know they were not alone, and partially to tell those other feminists, ‘Stop telling me what I’m supposed to like, damn it.’
As for my place in the larger feminist community, I have been writing about feminist issues for about eight years now: feminism and media criticism, feminism and sex, feminism and politics, feminism and my personal life, and so on. The spanking essay was just one piece of thousands I’ve written in my life (I’ve written over 2,200 posts for The Frisky alone). I would never want to be pigeonholed as if writing about spanking or BDSM is the only thing I have to contribute – it’s not. It just happens to be the most salacious. I would imagine Daphne Merkin, who wrote a piece for The New Yorker about how she loves spanking sex play, probably feels the same way.
Why would you say that you had so much trouble reconciling your feminism with your interest in being spanked? What about your early understanding of feminism made you believe that seeking out something you found pleasurable was in so much conflict with feminism?
It was not necessarily the act of spanking that I found difficult to reconcile, it was enjoying dominant relationships. I grew up seeing characters on TV and in movies getting spanked in a playful and sexual way (“I Love Lucy,” for example) and the act itself didn’t seem taboo so much as embarrassing. But wanted to be dominated by a man? Now that was taboo for a feminist. I knew intellectually that our feminist ancestors fought for us to be equals to our partners. I felt embarrassed that my grandmothers or great-grandmothers did not have the right to vote, keep a bank account in their own name, or own property, and may have been literally forced to be a maid/chef/mommy for their men. Playing around with domination and submission – being bossed around, being ordered to perform sex acts, being spanking or restrained, being verbally talked down to – all seemed antithetical to feminism by its basic definition. Around 2005, when I had my first dabblings in a dominant/submissive relationship, I found myself always wondering, “Is it OK for me to like this? How can I be a good feminist and still like a man taking charge outside the bedroom? ”
But again, it comes back to what happens in the bedroom and what happens in real life. I can enjoy things in the context of sex or flirting that I don’t want to happen in my day-to-day life. Once I felt secure in that knowledge, several years later, I was able to have a dominant/submissive relationship with a guy and it honestly resulted in some of the most erotic, sexually satisfying experiences of my life. To quote from my piece on The Frisky about it: