Porn? Also: You’re Allowed to Like Being Demeaned

Porn? Also: You’re Allowed to Like Being Demeaned

When people complain about sexual incompatibility with their partner, sometimes the complaint is that their partner enjoys doing something in bed that they find degrading, insulting, or otherwise outside their comfort zone. But what about when what you want your partner to do is something they aren’t comfortable with, because it would demean you?

A recent exchange between Slate’s  “How To Do It” columnists and one of their readers explores this very question. And while their advice touches on the question of whether the sex act in question truly is “demeaning”, Calico offers a whole different direction from which the befuddled letter writer can view her dilemma. What if true sexual autonomy includes the right to solicit ‘abuse‘ from our partners in a sexual context?

Driven in part by her own experience of learning about the BDSM community by way of trying to learn about kinky content and the preferences of people who love kinky content Calico asserts something that might sound counterintuitive on its face, but hopefully makes sense once you dig more deeply into her latest post: “Also: You’re Allowed to LIKE Being Demeaned.”

– Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com, Porn For Women and Couples

READ ON…

Early in what has unexpectedly turned into a career in the online adult entertainment industry, I was tasked with a job for which I knew I was not even a little bit qualified. 

The company for which I worked – an early adopter of video streaming technology and one of the first companies to provide adult video as leased content for third-party websites – had just received several enormous boxes of VHS tapes (yes, I’m old) and had begun digitizing their contents for eventual online distribution.

What was my task?

“Sort these into their respective niches,” my boss told me. “You know, like extreme bondage, Femdom, facesitting…. ball torture, wherever each movie fits. 

“Ball torture?” I mused to myself.

“You should be able to tell for most of them just from the title,” my boss continued, undaunted by the look on my face. “Questions?”

“Ball torture?” I mused – out loud, this time.

“Yeah, well…” my boss trailed off. “Different strokes for different folks and all that, right?”

I didn’t know it at that moment, but the task I’d just been assigned, a task I did not relish, was going to be the start of an important educational process that would leave me with a more open mind, a lot fewer misconceptions about sex and a great deal more respect for differences in sexual preferences, fantasies and practices.

A Fortunate and Enlightening Conversation

While I have never considered myself prudish or lacking in sexual adventurousness, in retrospect, as recently as the late 90s I was a young woman with very ‘safe,’ very mainstream ideas about what constituted ‘good’ and ‘pleasurable’ sex. As I sorted through that stack of videos and later skimmed through the digitized footage tagging specific sex acts, again and again I found myself thinking some variation of: “Nobody willingly does THAT unless they’re being paid to do so.”

I was wrong, of course. And later at adult industry trade events, when I had my first opportunity to meet some of the people who directed, produced and/or performed in some of the titles I had cataloged, I immediately realized just how wrong I’d been. 

One of the people I met was an earnest young sub featured in several femdom titles our company distributed. After we’d broken the ice and engaged in the requisite tradeshow small talk – and at my insistence – he went into great detail about what he loved about submitting himself to the whims of his Mistress.

He talked about the release of giving yourself over to another person and the level of trust and intimacy that surrender requires. He talked about the ecstasy of release, the intersection of pain and pleasure and how it all worked together to form a sense of adventure and pushing boundaries that he’d come to truly cherish and value. 

He even talked about the pleasure one can take from being demeaned, which he saw as part and parcel of the trust he had in his partner and the surrender to her. He said it required suspending one’s ego and further letting go – and further trust of your partner, who you also need to trust to understand boundaries and to separate sexual play from the daily nonsexual dynamics of an interpersonal relationship.

As we chatted on over the course of the evening, we were joined by his Mistress co-star, who was every bit as friendly, smart, eloquent and pleasant to be around as her partner. By the end of the night, I’d made two new friends, been introduced to by those new friends to valuable new business contacts and in the process removed several layers of stubborn, ignorance-driven assumptions and stereotypes about BDSM and the BDSM community from my mind.

Not bad for a night’s work.

Is it “Demeaning”? Maybe. Is that Really the Question, Though?

Anyway, the reason for this trip down Calico’s Memory Lane is that I just read a letter from a reader to Slate’s “How to Do It” columnists, the contents of which reminded me of some of the internal conflicts I had about certain depictions in porn, back before working with people in the BDSM community further opened my mind.

“In previous relationships, after I become comfortable with a guy and where we are sexually, I have wanted them to cum on me. My face, my tits, my stomach,” the letter states. “I love the act and love how it feels. I am currently in a relationship with a wonderful man. We are compatible in almost every way, but he absolutely refuses to do this because ‘it’s demeaning.’ Now, I understand why he feels this way given what he has seen in pornography. And I don’t want to push him to do something he doesn’t want to do. However, when we discussed this further, he said, ‘It’s demeaning and I don’t think you understand why.’ That got me upset, but I don’t know how to approach the next step.”

The letter goes on to explain that she is “comfortable with this act and haven’t found it demeaning in the past…not only because I enjoy it, but because of how secure I felt in my relationship with previous partners.”

First, I have to commend the letter’s author for not punching her partner in the nose for that whole “I don’t think you understand why” bit. Right or wrong, that likely would have been my response. (He’s worried about demeaning her and then says that? Brilliant.)

The response from How to Do It gives the letter writer solid advice on how to talk to her partner about it and maybe come to a compromise, so I’m not going to retrace that ground. Really, I’m just here to add one thought to the mix: Even if you think being ejaculated on is demeaning to you, if being demeaned in a sexual context is your thing, then it’s OK for you to like it. It’s really not anyone else’s call, even if they have a degree in psychiatry and an argument to offer that your preferences are ‘problematic.’ I say, unless there’s reason to think your kink for being demeaned is hampering your nonsexual day to day – say because your partner has started bullying you around outside the bedroom, too – it’s really nobody else’s business what you and your partner do in the bedroom, so long as everyone involved is a consenting adult and all the other necessary caveats. 

Could it be a problem for the relationship if your partner doesn’t see it the same way? Sure – and finding a middle ground is a good idea no matter how you slice it, assuming you can reach one. I’m just saying it doesn’t really hinge on whether or not we think it’s demeaning to be ejaculated on, because it instead hinges on a more fundamental question: Do we have the right to determine, explore and indulge in our own kinks as we see fit?

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