Content Notice: Description of BDSM practices–some moderate allusions. Pings like, 3/10 on the NSFW scale.
Fusion posted a story by Luna Malbroux about being into BDSM While Black, and it sets the stage for conversation about trying to engage in BDSM holding one (or more) minority statuses:
It’s not just Hollywood that makes it difficult for me to SWB (Sub While Black). Even the present-day black experience in America can get in the way of exploring different types of sexual “play.” Can you imagine what a black person might picture if her partner wants to roleplay as a cop? The growing list of victims—Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, just to name a few—is a constant reminder that as a black person in America, you are never safe. Which is a hard thing to balance when the very thrill of BDSM plays with our notions of safety.
My first impression of the BDSM scene was that it was overwhelmingly white—like, really white, as white as a Rascal Flatts concert at a country club in Montana. Even the watered-down pop franchise, 50 Shades of Grey, has to be one of the whitest franchises ever. BDSM has been around for centuries, originating with the writings of Marquis de Sade in the 1700s. There have been historical examples of BDSM in African sexual, spiritual, and religious culture and early black leather culture of “The Old Guard”—returning black gay male veterans of World War II. But black people into BDSM were rarely seen in the media until the early 1970s.
Malbroux goes on with an excellent recount of racial prejudice and its role in power exchange, I strongly recommend reading the whole article. Specific to her case is how consensual power exchange has uncomfortable echoes to non-consensual black slavery.
What is broadly applicable to any minority status is that, unfortunately, there exists a fetish or twenty for every minority. Participating in the BDSM community means watching people of majority demographics “wear” your minority status for the sake of a fetish, and that experience can be deeply, deeply, disturbing. To say nothing of sexualizing minorities specifically. In either case, these members of the majority can take off their clothes and their make-up and return to their privileged lives; meanwhile, the minorities who watch, gobsmacked at these behaviours, leave the dungeon just as oppressed as they were before. We’re supposed to play ball and never ever out the members of the dungeon who just used a safe space to try on our oppression as if it were a garment.
Basically, you want your cake and to eat it too. Oppression is fun to play with, but only as long as you get to take it off at the end of the day.
As you might have guessed, I have a problem with that. There’s a reason I’m 100% out of the closet on all of my intersections.
I wish I could say I came up with a coping mechanism before my current circumstances began limiting my participation in the local kink community. I never did. There are a number of practices which push my buttons as a trans woman, kinks which involve laughing at gender variance, turning it into a tool of humiliation for the recipient. And fine–trying to do the same to me will get laughs. From me. I’ll call you a moron if you think my femininity is humiliating, because you’ve clearly missed the point of transitioning. I don’t “brat” often, which is to say submit defiantly, but subjecting me to that would get some pretty vocal objections from me.
Basically, there’s this myth that the kinky community is more tolerant than the culture from which it came. I dispute this. The kinky community inherited all the same prejudices as the dominant (heh) culture from which it came. Playing with those prejudices should generally be left to those subjected to the prejudice, for the same reason that racial humour is seldom well met from white comedians or gender humour is well met from male comedians.
-Shiv