S. & Fem.

‘When My Boyfriend Spanks Me, My Inner Feminist Weeps’ is the title of a short poem by A.K. Blakemore in her award-winning collection Fondue (2018).

Let’s be clear about one thing from the start. It is not a poem about being spanked by her boyfriend. I don’t know if he really does spank her, or whether she even has a boyfriend at all. I can’t quite say that this is a matter of absolutely no possible interest, because I might find the idea mildly titillating; and I also can’t quite say that it’s absolutely none of our business, because you can’t claim a right of privacy for the things you make public – can’t fling open the bedroom door to the world and then object if someone looks inside. Once you publish something, it’s then for the public to decide whether or not it’s of any interest. But what I can say is that the point of the poem, and therefore its primary claim on our attention, has nothing to do with spanking in any literal sense.

It’s a poem about the tension, or contradiction, between a woman’s sense of self-worth and her wish to please her man sexually. There’s a familiar sneer at ‘male predictability’, evinced in a bar statue of a wench with the varnish worn off her breasts by repeated groping, and there’s a piece of reasonable plain-speaking in the line ‘I know I don’t deserve to be hurt’. But when in bed, she does whatever it is that the boyfriend likes.

The poem leads me to two substantial thoughts, or observations, about feminism, by which (and please take this as read throughout all that follows) I mean some versions of feminism and not necessarily the movement in its entirety.

The first observation is that feminists, inner and otherwise, seem to do a lot of weeping. I am struck by the way ‘women’s history’ is often framed as a narrative of gender oppression. In theory, it could be just a neutral account of a past mode of social organization that is different from today’s (and not one that most people now living would seriously wish to return to in earnest, any more than we want to have doctors stick leeches on us or consult sheep’s entrails for the weather forecast). But in practice, it often functions as what you might call ‘misogyny porn’ (which is, of course, not to be confused with misogynistic porn). It is as if some contemporary feminists feel a compulsion to keep on returning to the actual or perceived wrongs of the dead past in order to keep alive the sense of grievance that fuels the politics of the movement.

We find the same phenomenon on a smaller scale in the visceral outrage typically provoked by spanking scenes and imagery, which could be illustrated with a hundred contemptuous comments quoted from reviews of modern productions of Kiss Me Kate. It is not, on this occasion, my point that this reaction entails a fundamental misunderstanding of how and why others enjoy such material, but rather that there is an element of dependency here: that some feminists need spanking, not in the sense that’s sometimes asserted by the more bone-headed and self-unaware kind of socially conservative spanko, but because they enjoy the outrage and draw validation from it, and therefore need something to be affronted by in the first place.

In short, there is a streak of sublimated masochism in these ‘weeping feminists’.

Don’t look back in anger; look around in awareness. When I do so in the parts of the world that I know best, the creative and media sectors of the western liberal democracies, I see an environment where the feminist movement has largely achieved what it set out to do, and shouldn’t need to bring out the historical horror stories quite so insistently anymore. Religions and cults need to self-perpetuate like that; responsible political and social movements don’t, because they have defined, reasonable and achievable objectives beyond their own mere continuing existence. It follows that there must be a point when the job is done and the movement can disband and its members move on to other fruitful projects.

I don’t want that to sound complacent. The job isn’t done everywhere in the world: looking farther afield, and admittedly with the benefit of less local knowledge, I see many places where the position of women is dreadful and needs to change, the sooner the better; Afghanistan is an obvious and extreme example. I also don’t want to pontificate ignorantly about parts of our own society that are beyond my immediate ken. At this stage I am simply articulating an uncomfortable feeling that there’s something slippery and cultish about a movement that operates in practice through endless deferral; there’s always ‘more to be done’, just as you never get to heaven until you die. This is secured through the choice, or creation, of an enemy that can never be defeated because it is functionally immortal, since its only real existence is as a mental construct: nobody has ever seen ‘the patriarchy’, just as nobody has ever actually met Satan. Moreover, it is protected by a defense mechanism comparable to the taboo on blasphemy, as evinced in the reflex-action ‘feminism is not the problem’ comments one often gets after trying to talk rationally and even-handedly about the negative side of its impact on the world.

Of course, there is a positive side too: a whole lot of good has been done to society. But if feminism is reckoned to need to change with the times, shifting its goals rather than retiring in satisfaction at the changes it has effected, then there is a risk that the good will recede into the movement’s past and the bad will come to the fore.

Feminists in Europe and North America talk less than they once did about equality, which, considered rightly, is just another word for fairness and as such can hardly be faulted as an objective. Nowadays we hear a lot more about empowerment. This is a much more sinister proposition, because power is a zero sum phenomenon: nobody has power unless someone else doesn’t, so that the natural corollary of anyone’s empowerment is somebody else’s disempowerment. What that also means is that power is necessarily at odds with liberty, and one of the challenges of civil society is finding the right balance between them. I want us all to be as little subject to the power of other people as is compatible with the well-being of myself and everyone else in the world. (In other words, I’m a liberal, not an anarchist.) So I don’t support an arbitrary project for ‘female empowerment’ any more than an equally arbitrary ‘male empowerment’. Empowerment is mostly harmful, and I wish that progressive and liberal political movements would talk instead in terms of ‘enablement’.

I suppose many activists do in fact have enablement as their aim, an entirely noble one, and much of this talk of ‘empowerment’ is just loose language. But not all of it. And empowerment means more than having what we all should have regardless of gender, a voice to be heard in a rational, honest, civilized debate between equals. Empowerment entails the ability to coerce others against their will, perhaps through brute force but more often through domination and fear. Let’s see how it can sometimes operate with a particular case in point. It is a true story.

Some years ago, a young male scientist appeared on television to discuss some significant project, and made the mistake of wearing a ‘retro’ tie with a scantily-clad lady on it. Because he had supposedly ‘objectified women’, he himself became the object of a storm of outrage that completely eclipsed whatever serious subject he had been there to talk about; he was even threatened with dismissal from his job. The upshot was that he had to go on a subsequent edition of the show to make a tearful public apology for, in effect, his poor dress sense.

These were not the tears of the weeping inner feminist at the compromises she has found herself making when her boyfriend spanks her. They were tears of a frightened man who had meant no harm (nor done any, in any real sense), but was adjudged to have committed a cardinal sin, and was now being targeted and victimized for it. The offending tie, incidentally, was a bespoke item designed by a woman.

This is the point that my argument has been meandering towards: feminism is not only masochistic; it is sadistic too.

Many feminists may hate spanking, but they operate, often non-consensually, according to the same psychological mechanisms as spankos. Perhaps that accounts for a persistent sense I have, and maybe others do too, that when I attempt to engage honestly with them, I often wind up feeling as if I’m trapped in someone else’s authoritarian fantasy. No thanks, that’s not healthy.

And that brings me to the other big thought sparked off by A.K. Blakemore’s poem. The title is quoted from an internet meme that began circulating in the early 2000s, before Blakemore herself was even a teenager. But the quotation is significantly selective, in a way that simplifies the issue by removing a second layer of contradiction:

The inner feminist of the poem weeps because she allows her boyfriend to spank her for his own pleasure: she doesn’t deserve to be hurt, so why is she putting up with it?

The woman of the meme, older and wiser, knows perfectly well why: the boyfriend may get pleasure, but she does too.

The inner feminist weeps not at the compromise, but at her own impotence. Feminism has many benign applications in society at large, but it simply doesn’t work when applied to the realm of sexuality. To give a ‘for-instance’ that’s so basic as to risk being crass, the principle of gender equality does not mean that we all have to be bi- or pansexual: it’s simply a given that I am sexually attracted to women and not to men, and we can particularize from there until we get to spanking (or raunchy ties, or statue-groping, or whatever other lawful thing that anyone, male or female, likes doing or enjoys fantasizing about). There have to be limits to the applicability of feminist thought. The inner feminist can weep all she likes, but she’s still not allowed in.