WTF! BDSM in the RCMP? ITEOTWAWKI!

[Warren DeMontague]

Crap! Does iverglas know about this?

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

1. So what is the official position on BDSM?

Let's put dominatrices out of work?

[Warren DeMontague]

2. Sherlock Holmes would not approve.

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

3. In all seriousness, I read the essay posted

The comments section is great. Sex positive feminists into BDSM being lectured "We don't care what you do in your bedroom!" while being told there may be no way they can make "educated consent" in the patriarchal society.

Sounds familiar.

[Warren DeMontague]

4. I may get into it in depth later, if I feel so inclined, but the piece itself really reads like a

"radfem greatest hits" album.

It's got all the old-timey classic favorites, from the oversimplified, cartoonish misrepresentation of behaviors they can't be bothered to try to understand, to the ridiculous conflation -deliberate or no- of consensual activities with non consensual ones, legal with illegal, etc.

And of course, the breathless protestations about how "we don't want to tell anyone what not to do" followed by a 10 paragraph diatribe on what they don't want people to do and why they're entitled to tell them not to do it.

Same shit, different blog, basically.

[Upton]

7. That brings up a good point..

I wonder if we'd be hearing the same outrage if the RCMP officer was female and a dominatrix?

[opiate69]

5. wait... what did I miss??

[Major Nikon]

10. This

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12557174

[opiate69]

11. Thanks, Major....

I did wind up finding it last night.. I was going to post some thoughts on it today, (being one of the resident "lifestylers&quot but really, everyone else seems to have covered it pretty well. The ultimate fact is, some people simply cannot fathom that other people engage in consensual activities which they find distasteful. Really, a sign of a small mind imo.
(also, I find it extremely humorous that the brain-trust in that thread is writing little asides to our host. Very mature lmao)

[Major Nikon]

12. I have a simple suggestion for that

If you don't want to be mocked for making the same fallacious and irrational argument that the wingnut thought police are making, don't make the same fallacious and irrational argument that the wingnut thought police are making.

[4th law of robotics]

13. They took care of that discrepancy

They will continue to quote wingnut sources but if you call them out on it they will say you hate women and ban you from their group.

See? Problem solved!

[Major Nikon]

15. Another thing I've noticed

The same people who call others out for mocking them outside 'their' group have absolutely no compunction against mocking others all over DU.

I find that more than just a little hypocritical.

[opiate69]

16. Yep yep yep...

It`s like hiding behind the castle gates, loudly hurling insults at the commoners passing by.

[4th law of robotics]

31. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!

Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.

[opiate69]

32. lmao! exactly!

[lumberjack_jeff]

19. Here's an "even more super sexxxy picture of a woman" in her honor.

[Warren DeMontague]

20. Odd how, in my porn-addled male gaze objectifying misogyny, I forgot to not take her seriously

I mean, my poor erotoxin-addled brain is INCAPABLE of seeing a woman as anything other than a "fuck toy" or some such gibberhoodle, which makes it incredibly odd that Liz Warren is at the top of my list for 2016 Presidential candidates, assuming of course she wins this November.

Although the RW is gonna hammer that Cherokee nonsense to death. But she's great. Really, you want to talk about people who can frame the economic arguments better, there's your go-to person.

[lumberjack_jeff]

21. "want to talk about people who can frame the economic arguments better, there's your go-to person"

+100

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

22. Sounds like "nice guy" talk, Warren

We know what you're up to. We know.

[Warren DeMontague]

25. Please, please! Allow me to mansplain! Er, sorry, explain!

[opiate69]

14. Seems simple enough....

Unfortunately, when one`s academic credentials consist of nothing more than vigorous searching on Google, I guess "simple" becomes relative. lol

[Warren DeMontague]

17. Apparently, the idea that the ever-expanding list of people who've been blocked from that group

might want an alternate venue in which to explore some of the issues being addressed in a decidedly one-sided fashion over there, is too hard to grasp.

I will say this, though. We've never needed an excuse to post "ever more sexxxay pictures of women" (or men, for folks who like that) ...




It's telling that "sexxxxay" is held in such disdain, and low regard in some quarters. Yes, indeed, sex is stupid. Dirty. Low brow. To be avoided at all costs. Because God doesn't like it it enables the Patriarchy. Or something.

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

24. Here's my offering

Nina pisses off rad fem anti-sex forces more than anyone. Smart, sexy, liberal and doesn't take any shit.

[Warren DeMontague]

26. Yep. There are a whole long list of happy, unapologetic porn people who fuck up the narrative.

Really hard to make the case that "no one can consent because they're being forced to do it via economics or otherwise" when people say "Um, actually, I'm happy I did it, it's been very lucrative, TYVM"

[opiate69]

33. speaking of Nina Hartley..

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=830505

Got into a nice discussion with her on fetlife about it as well... very cool woman.

[opiate69]

39. Very confused....

as to why Loli`s reply to this post was hidden?

[lumberjack_jeff]

40. not very well

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1240122832#post2

[Upton]

8. Targeted for being kinky..

I'm not even sure who Meghan Murphy is, sounds like a sex negative second wave radfem, but the majority of the comments following the piece at this particular site, from women and what appears to be some men, disagree with her conclusions..For example:

Funny thing though; as well as being a feminist to the core, I like to be tied up and beaten. I have never in my life been abused, raped, or suffered any kind of sexual (or indeed non-sexual) trauma. I am not in any way mentally ill. I also enjoy tying up men and beating them. They aren't mentally damaged either. So where do these perverted desires come from? Am I a bad person because of the things I enjoy? Well according to your article and one sided, sensationalist opinions, it would seem so.

or:

As many posters have already indicated, what we do in private for pleasure has no bearing on how people govern their relationships, and govern themselves in their jobs. We have theoretically stopped discriminating on race, on sexual orientation (apparently you can be gay, just don't be kinky?) and religion. And yet, when it comes to other aspects of sexuality, this passes as acceptable and reasoned discourse? This is sophistry and rhetoric; arguments and facts twisted to make an ideological point with no reference to facts, research or statistics.

or:

I already addressed the distinction between fantasy and reality. Are there some sick people in BDSM? Of course there are - in exactly the same probabilistic distribution there are in any other random sampling of society. Brown *might* be one of them, but a feminist painting BDSM practitioners with the "you're a sicko misogynist" brush is no better than any man painting women with the "you should be in the kitchen" brush. Do you really want to lose all your progress as a feminist by indulging in the very kind of discrimination you want to see abolished?

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/feminist-current/2012/07/private-fantasy-public-reality-rcmp-bdsm-and-violence-agains

It's great to see people from the BDSM community standing up to such drivel..

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

23. No, they are all "victims"

They don't realize.....the reason they enjoy it is "conditioning". Simply put, any form of sex in the patriarchal society must be judged, in some way, as wrong.

[loli phabay]

37. reply

i disagree, people enjoy all sorts of stuff that enjoy others dont, each persons meal is from a different part of the fish.

[4th law of robotics]

9. Once again the radical left and radical right are indistinguishable from each other

"How can we trust Mr. Soandso in a position of authority? Don't you know he's a pervert? Now I know people have a right to do as they please in private but what he does with his genitals is so disgusting it must bleed over in to his public life! This sicko needs to be arrested and punished for enjoying organsms in a way god/dworkin never approved!"

Pearl clutching at it's finest. I'm glad most of the comments were sane.

/have the radfems decided homosexual activity must necessarily lead to insanity and child abuse or are they leaving that prudishness to the fundies for now?

[Warren DeMontague]

18. I promised a bit of a breakdown on the original article, scare quotes and all, so here goes Part I:

http://feministcurrent.com/5600/private-fantasy-public-reality-the-rcmp-bdsm-and-violence-against-women/

Here's the "ridiculous" response from the RCMP, that the 2nd Wave Patriarchy-Battlers have such a problem with:

was deemed to be adult consensual activity during which the implicated officer was not representing himself as a member of the RCMP, thus it did not meet the threshold for a code of conduct investigation

Um, okay, that really sounds like case closed, to me.

Did the behavior interfere with the guy's performance of his job? No evidence it did.

Was the behavior legal and between consenting adults? It was.

Was the behavior icky or questionable or potentially upsetting to some people given the fact that this guy had been involved in investigating serial killers, even though serial killing and consensual legal BDSM between adults are two completely different things? Yeah. So, okay, maybe the RCMP need to include a morals clause in their employment contract, but folks eager to do that need to remember that historically, the FIRST people who are going to be targeted when employers start going after consensual adult behavior outside of the confines of work, are going to be gays and lesbians.


Okay, Gotta Go right now, but I'll do a part II later.

[Warren DeMontague]

27. Part II:

The entire core conceit if the piece is exposed in the title; "Private fantasy, public reality". That construction,that juxtaposition, is deliberate.

http://feministcurrent.com/5600/private-fantasy-public-reality-the-rcmp-bdsm-and-violence-against-women/

It is deliberate because it is a top tier fetish (yes, i will use that word) of the authoritarian anti-sex factions of the 2nd wave to justify meddling in the private choices of consenting adults, to argue that so-called "private behavior" (scare quotes, heavy sighs, eye rolling) is not private at all, but political and as such needs to be policed by the brave batllers of all things Patriarchalus.

Patron saint Dworkin essentially said that any time any woman's body is invaded by a penis in a so-called "consensual" (scare quotes, again) sex act, all women everywhere are harmed via spooky patriarchal quantum action-at-a-distance. Take that, Einstein, you phallopressor!

Let's work through the piece, shall we?

The scenes were violent, degrading

Subjective opinion. By all accounts, the scenes were consensual and more than a little bit ridiculous, although yes "ridiculous" is subjective opinion, too.

How could a man who so clearly enjoys degrading women fairly assess a case that is explicitly about violence against women, about dehumanizing women, and that played out as it did (in that the disappearances of women from the Downtown Eastside were ignored by the police for years) because the women who were going missing were viewed as worthless?

Um, well, for one, Feminism 101 tells us that "under patriarchy", ALL hetero PIV sex is degrading and oppressive, so ANY man who enjoys that sort of thing - particularly if his brain has been reprogrammed by the heroin-like erotoxins of pictures of nekkid women - is incapable of doing that job, or seeing women as anything other than power tools, etc. But the bottom line, here, is there are two totally separate issues- people doing (or not doing) their jobs, and what those people choose to do when not working. If someone isn't doing their job, for whatever reason, fire them.

The recent push of a ‘sex-positive’ ideology which has permeated our discussions of sex and sexuality in North America says that anything goes so long as it happens in the privacy of our bedrooms and is ‘consensual’. It’s how we defend pornography, prostitution, and of course, things like BDSM. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to argue that our individual sex lives should somehow be regulated, the whole hands-off, libertarian, ‘whatever happens between consenting adults’ party line we must all toe as progressive, politically correct people makes it next to impossible to address behaviour like Brown’s when it comes to light.

And there it is, complete with the requisite scare quotes around "consensual", because we know no womyn ever REALLY consent to nasty, icky, oppressive things like PIV "sex".

Apparently this author thinks she's being extra-reasonable by grudgingly conceding that she can't, personally, be in charge of what the whole world does in the "privacy" (sigh sigh eyeroll eyeroll) of their bedrooms.. Nonetheless, those kooky libertarians with their fucked up libertarian arguments about how others shouldnt be in charge of what consenting adults do in their own bedrooms... are they craaaazay, or whut?

And wait a minute. Okay, so you dont want to tell people what to do, but you DO want to "address the behavior"

Um, i'll bite, then. HOW?

When the VPD were found to have been watching porn on the job instead of investigating the missing and murdered women, what we pretend is ‘private’ became public. When Catherine Galliford came out about the years of sexual harassment and sexual assault she faced while she was a member of the RCMP, what was once ‘private’ suddenly became ‘public’.  We’ve long treated abuse as a ‘private’, ‘family matter’. We know better now. Brown’s ‘private’ life, wherein he fetishized the abuse and degradation of women, is not *just* a private issue. This is a case where what one does ‘in private’ clearly has a public impact. The ‘private’ behaviour of misogynist men is not simply a private fantasy, but it is a public reality — whether or not the men are outed about their behaviour.

Holy conflate-a-palooza, Batperson! Okay, well, for one, when the VPD were found blah blah blah, what they were doing was NOT private bc it was interfering with thir PUBLIC jobs on the PUBLIC dime.

Sexual harrasment? Terrible, but again, not private, not consensual. Not legal.

Abuse? Not consensual, not legal, not on topic.



More to come, including some armchair psychoanalysis as to "why", in Part III. Stay tuned!

[Warren DeMontague]

28. And, now, for the armchair psychoanalysis bit:

As I've said before, it's damn clear that what is driving much of this puritannical, anti-sex authoritarianism is somehow religion-based, either sublimated religious guilt, stealth (and not so stealth) alliances with the religious right, flat-out fundamentalism or simply people who have redirected it and don't realize it.

It is fascinating, when the topic comes to BDSM, how many of the 2nd wave feminist figures who opine on it, either allude to or directly acknowledge their own submissive sexual orientation. Dworkin herself was known to favor sub sex with her male partners, at least in her previous life. So how do we reconcile this? Or, more importantly, how do they?

As is alluded to in the other thread, I think it's probably true that most 2nd Wave Feminists who have a D or S sexual orientation are probably Sub. Why do I say this? Because, statistically, most people have that orientation. Again, it's pointed out in the other thread that subs far outnumber dominants, across the spectrum- male, female, gay, straight. It is speculated that this has to do with more people wanting to have a passive audience role than a stage driver role, but I think there's more to it than that: I think that people, in general, as animals burdened with the (relatively unique, as far as we know) weight of cognizance and sentience and language and civilization and all the rest, humans in general are tasked with a tremendous amount of control. Responsibility. In Buddhist terms, attachment.

Sexuality, and probably for those so inclined submissive sexuality, undoubtedly has appeal because people like to let go. They like to "lose control", they like to be swept away and give themselves over to something outside themselves. It could be argued that this impulse is behind much of our religion, as well.

So, people, statistically, skew sub. Not just people like Sherlock Holmes, but even 2nd Wave feminists educated in Dworkin and MacKinnon and "The Patriarchy" and the rest of it. Which has gotta cause a FUCKLOAD of cognitive dissonance. Along with our old friend, sexual guilt. (And here comes religion!) But for the authoritarian 2nd wave radfem, a simple solution presents itself by ascribing the personal sexual feelings and desires to a nefarious, external programming- Of course! I don't really enjoy those fur-covered handcuffs! .... "I Blame The Patriarchy!"

The problem is, it seems our sexuality is fairly hard-wired. Nonsense about programming and erotoxins aside, people like what they like and they keep liking it, which is why the sick fucks who are wired to like kids are, to my mind, not rehabilitatable. So in the case of your M/D Radfem who happens to be a little (or a lot) S, they aren't going to embrace their sexuality and be, like, "great, I'll find consenting adults who are compatible and we'll be safe, sane, and all the rest" because that person is going to be CONVINCED that not only is their sexuality a negative force that was put there by a nefarious space penis conspiracy, but also that it must be stamped out at all costs.

But that doesn't work, generally.

So unable to fix this glaring so-called "problem" in the self, it is the World which must be modified and corrected.

[opiate69]

29. Very well stated, Warren.

[4th law of robotics]

30. It kind of reminds me of the way many closeted fundamentalists

(closeted as homosexuals, they're very open about being fundamentalists) view homosexuality.

They have this ideology that tells them everything their brain is telling them is wrong. All their natural urges: evil. So rather than deal with their own personal hangups they project their inner problems. It's society that is sick. It's society that puts all these crazy thoughts in your head.

I really think anyone who objectives to perfectly consensual sex between mentally competent adults suffers from some sort of sexual hangup themself. No matter how they couch their objections (god, the patriarchy, whatever).

/great assessment by the way

[Warren DeMontague]

34. musta hit a nerve.

[hifiguy]

38. Cognitive dissonance leads to denial and projection.

Just look at the reichwingers and repukes in the political world. Same goes here.

Excellent piece, Warren.

[opiate69]

35. It doesn`t surprise me that this happened in Vancouver

There`s a very active community there.. I recommend looking on Netflix for the series "Kink". The first season was filmed in Vancouver.. very good, documentary style series.