HOST: Welcome to ContraPoints. I’m your host John Jane… Jackson. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Tonight our guests are Sir Beatrix Bumbridge, prominent sadomasochist and 17th Marquis de Baton Rouge, and Abigail Cockbane, feminist activist and author of You Can Come for Free at Home: The Case Against Prostitution.

Tonight they’ll be debating the question, is BDSM feminist? Now Sir Beatrix, you are a practicing kinkster, and according to your FetLife profile you “live the lifestyle 24/7” and are into “paddling, bondage, penis humiliation, panty sniffing, CMNF, CFNM, and… ass worship.” 

SIR: Indeed.

HOST: But you call yourself a feminist. Please explain.

SIR: Well John, feminism is about a woman’s right to choose, and if that means she chooses for her husband to tie her thighs astride the dishwater and pommel her backside till it flushes with the fuchsia flare of a newborn’s cheek, that’s her right as a woman, so long as she does so in a safe, sane, consensual way.

HOST: I see. And Ms. Cockbane, what do you think about that?

MS: WELL, it’s all good and fine to talk about choice. But don’t we also have to consider the context in which our choices are made? In a patriarchal, pornographic society where women are constantly pressured to submit to male dominance, is there really any meaningful sense in which women can genuinely consent to sexual subjugation?

SIR: Well, Cockbane, I think it’s not really your place to question whether an adult woman knows what she wants.

MS: But the thing is, I don’t care what you want, and I don’t care what your girlfriend wants. If you want to have your leather costume parties and beat each other senseless, I don’t care, and I don’t want to hear about it.

SIR: Well, clearly you care a little bit.

MS: But everything isn’t all about you and your special little sexual whims. Do these submissive women ever pause to wonder why they enjoy being dominated and abused by men? Do they think they just came out of the womb with a desire to be tortured and humiliated? Or does it ever occur to them that just maybe a whole lifetime of cultural glorification of female submission has influenced their desires?

SIR: Well, if you’re such an expert psychoanalyst, then why don’t you explain why there are men who want to be dominated, and women who want to be dominated by other women?

MS: WELL, patriarchy affects everyone. And just because you’re a lesbian or a man doesn’t mean you aren’t influenced by the same cultural pressures, and reproducing the same power dynamics.

SIR: But every decision we make is influenced by cultural pressures. I mean if cultural pressure renders choices illegitimate, then I suppose all choice is an illusion, and we should just give up on the idea of freedom altogether.

HOST: Well, hold on a minute, don’t you think Ms. Cockbane has a bit of a point. Isn’t it worth questioning where our desires come from, instead of just taking them as given?

SIR: Questioning, sure. We live in a dark world, and maybe that’s why we have dark desires. But society can’t be fixed in a lifetime, and we all have to live with the desires we have. So if I choose, in full knowledge of the darkness, that I want to act out my dark fantasies in a responsible way with consenting adults, then I don’t see what basis the Abigail Cockbanes of the world have to scold me for my choice.

MS: WELL WELL WELL, “choice” and “consent” aren’t magic words that make everything feminist. Anti-abolitionists once argued that slaves were happier as slaves, and there are victims of sex trafficking today who are so internally oppressed that they believe they consented to their own subjection. But that doesn’t make it okay, it doesn’t make it a real choice, and it certainly doesn’t make it feminist.

SIR: What is this absurd equivocation between violent coercion and vague cultural influences? Do you not see the difference between being locked in chains at gunpoint and simply wanting to do something because you saw it in a movie?

MS: WELL, when the thing you “want to do” is be tortured, then no, I don’t see that much of a difference.

SIR: Torture?? Oh this is good.

MS: According to the International Council for Rehabilitation of Torture Victims, beating, shocking, stretching, submersing and suffocating victims are among the most common methods of torture. And it is not legal to consent to torture.

SIR: Fuck this.

MS: So the sexual practices you’re advocating are not only illegal and immoral, but actually in violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

HOST: Okay, and Sir Beatrix, how do you respond to that?

SIR: [Gimp mask]

HOST: Sir Beatrix?

SIR: [in mask] I can’t deal with this.

HOST: Sir Beatrix, please remove the gimp mask.

SIR: I’m going to my happy place.

HOST: Well, we’ll give him a moment. To be fair, Ms. Cockbane, I think your argument here is a little out of line. Do you really not see a major difference between involuntary torture and consensual masochism done for the sake of pleasure?

MS: WELL WELL WELL John I just don’t see what’s pleasurable about it. 

HOST: But some people do find it pleasurable. Sir Beatrix, are you ready? Could you please comment on this?

SIR: *Sigh* Alright. Look, Cockbane, your problem is you have a naïve idea about what pain and pleasure are. Since you radical feminists are so good at deconstructing false binaries, why don’t you get to work on the pleasure-pain distinction.

MS: Well, it’s just inconceivable to me that there could be anything pleasurable about being whipped, and bound and abused.

SIR: Have you ever gone running? Ever heard of the runner’s high? What about really spicy food? Pain and pleasure are often mixed. Sometimes the road to heaven goes through hell.

MS: I just don’t see how that applies to sex. I can’t imagine being turned on by the… firm grip of Master’s hands around my thighs as he bites the side of my neck, 

my back arching as the straps are tightened ‘round my wrists and ankles, yes, and shivers up my spine as I anticipate the first drip of candle wax on my pert, exposed breasts, 

and the intense, full-body shock that surges through me when his flogger cracks across my innocent pale buttocks, awakening my inner goddess as I dissolve into a deliquescent paradise of shuddering orgasms.

[reactions]

…No, I just don’t see anything sexually arousing about that.

HOST: Okay. Well, if I didn’t know better I’d say at the very least you sound a little curious.

MS: Well! So what if I am curious! There are plenty of victims whose sexual fantasies are shaped by their own trauma, but that doesn’t make it okay!

SIR: Are you a victim of trauma?

MS: Well no, but—

SIR: Well there you go.

HOST: Hey! Hey! Can you please try to be civil? Don’t ask intrusive questions.

SIR: I’m sorry, I just resent the implication that sexual kinks are the result of trauma.

HOST: Well, it was still out of line. 

SIR: I’m just trying to say that it’s a false and harmful misconception about kink that you shouldn’t be propagating uncritically on your show.

HOST: Alright, well fair enough. Anyway, we’re running out of time. 

SIR: Let me just say, 

HOST: Oh god. I hate my job.

SIR: …for the record, that my kinks have nothing to do with any past trauma. I’m completely fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m really completely fine. I got involved in kink in the most innocent possible way. You see, when I was a boy, my family had a Japanese governess who used to dress me up in my sister’s clothes. Everyday when I came home from school she would pick out a new frilly dress for me and she would brush my hair. I can still remember the way the stockings felt as she unrolled them up my legs. Never had I known such rapture! At least, until one day when father came home early. Oh no!

Honey, I’m home! 

Oh god, it’s all rushing back, man. Oh god. I’m a sissy bitch. I’m a sissy bitch. Bad, bad, bad.

HOST: Alright. Well, Thank you both for coming on. Tonight we’ve learned that upon this stage we call the world, men, women and all us other actors are all just kind of fucked up. So, it’s best not to think about these things too much, because rational discourse leads nowhere, and introspection only uncovers the terrible traumas of your past, which you wish you had remembered to forget. In fact, I suppose it’s better to just get drunk, and leave a comment on a YouTube video. So, from the ContraPoints studio here in Baltimore, I bid you all goodnight.

Um, could someone turn the lights back on? I had a glass of wine around here somewhere. Crash. Oh come on! I was fucking holding it. Fuck you guys.