In less wholly conventional arrangements e. Normative sexuality actualizes in the bodies of its participants the patriarchal ideology of masculine dominance and feminine submission. The woman feminine is on the bottom. The man masculine mounts her. He holds her down. Stifled she silences, such a sweetheart. Men, meanwhile, are typically drawn to females who appear in some way physically vulnerable e.
Rape fantasies are a staple of both the female and male sexual imaginary: men fantasize about raping, women about being raped. Every fifth woman will be raped before she dies. A man will rape her. This is all very typical to the point of triteness. Inequity itself is the erotic engine of BDSM, embodied carnally through acts of violence and degradation performed by the Man-master, for the sake of his sexual pleasure, upon his Woman-Slave, whose correlative pleasure lies in enduring pain and humiliation imposed by someone more powerful than herself, to whom she is bound: her Master.
He possesses a phallus, she is a hole. Ah, consensual catharsis! No inversion nor subversion occurs; the relationship between BDSM and standard sex is one of mirroring, elaboration, inflammation, exaggeration. BDSM is standard sex on steroids. Yet, hyped as a deviation from rather than a distillation of the standard, BDSM is embraced as sub- or even countercultural, a system of sexual transgression by which the strictures of an authoritarian and repressed, repressive, oppressive and prudishly anti-erotic society can be thrown off.
Reminiscent depictions of women tortured for the sake of sexual pleasure are similarly abundant in pornography and in best-selling romantic novels and films. However, simply because a certain theme is pervasive in every sphere of society, resonates everywhere and cannot be avoided almost anywhere, does that make it conventional and mainstream and therefore not especially transgressive?
The Bad Boys in their infinite incendiary wisdom disagree. The Marquis de Sade spent much of his adult life in and out of prison, which he considered to be a monstrous injustice. So too do his admirers, who are myriad.
