I am feminist and I wanna marry a Sugar Daddy

Actually I don’t, because I just had my first friend’s wedding and I had to contain myself for to not give a speech like this, word for word. But yes, this is is not that unbelievable as it sounds.

That’s called the third-wave feminism, which claims for the free will of women above all else even if the goal itself seems to contradict the feminism pillars and ultimately, the common sense. Nowadays, feminism is thought to be liberation from the framework of society so anything once labelled as degrading can easily turn into a revolutionary and empowering behaviour. For example, posting a naked selfie on Internet was once considered as sexually objectification and now is considered a way to take back the control of our bodies. But this empowerment goes further to such a degree of getting married for money, becoming prostitute to pay your studies or having your eggs frozen by your company to preserve your ultimate mother role for the future. And these are only some of the choices opening up before our eyes.

What a time to be alive, right?

Do not get me wrong. I agree with the idea of encouraging women to take control of their lives. But I have to stay ironic while facing the possibility of our subversive feminism is actually leading us to freely choose what we used to condemn for being harassing and patronising. This point is actually fascinating to me. The paradox of the feminist who deliberately choose to play the role she has been relegated to for ages. When it comes about free will, apparently there is nothing to be exhorted.

Except because it is. And I apologise in advance for questioning everyone’s else consciousness as I question mine everyday, but the mere fact of taking a choice does not mean we are not slightly coerced to. I really would like to be maniqueist enough to firmly affirm that our choices are freely chosen while denying the existence of a systemic oppression to create circumstances that push us into a way or another though. Even if I would like they don’t, social norms dictate our actions and our preferences at some extent. But my last intention is to shame women who engage in these practices; instead, it is only to critically reflect upon the political implications of our very intimate choices.

Another interesting subject of discussion is BDSM, in which I got involved recently. The voluntary polarisation of power roles is desirable in theory but is not that much in practice. Being a tireless curious person is nearly impossible not to feel attracted by anything able to challenge the sexual status quo. In this particular case, the fantasy of domination/submission is definitely interesting as it has been proved by science as an effective way to fight anxiety by giving go-ahead to your sexual pulsions. But what I realised after all is that domination/submission is less physical-focused than I used to think and it is more about going beyond your psychological “self-imposed” boundaries.

Even psychological, while limited to the bedroom, this exploration might work. Although it seems inevitable that the power exchange playacting transcends the bedroom. In the name of self-empowerment, you could suddenly get involved in a domination/submission 24/7 relationship where your whole identity has been shaped around your submissive mindset. In these sense, I do not have any doubt about how intense and sexually pleasurable may be a full-time fetish-based life-style. But about these fancy people feeling outsider and seditious of having a relationship which totally goes against the norm… Ewwwww, yes I have a reasonable doubt about it.

As far as I could see so far, BDSM is supposed to be built over a strong concept of consent while paradoxically its ultimate goals seems to be getting a symbiosis in which the concept of consent does not really matter anymore. Ideally, the real submission is to be psychologically dissociate from your own body so you can momentarily lose your self-preservation drive and put your life in some else’s hands. Oh man, that sounds kinda romantic. Sounds exactly like the rest of fucked up unbalanced relationship I have to deal with the rest of the time. With the meaningful difference you gave your consent at some point and as a consequence of that, you have travelled all at once to another dimension totally divorced from reality where people knows exactly how much pain they must inflict to people. To be honest, feels like the subjugation to the pleasure aroused by violence is just the same violence blurred by the vacuum concept of consent and the dogma of the erotization of dominance and brutality. Me myself, I am far to understand why I feel attracted by certain harmful things, but I could never assert they do not have anything to do with my past experiences and my Jewish-Christian-deep-rooted education.

What especially blew my mind about this role playing dichotomy — because Internet is dark and full of terrors and I obliviously Googled and Reddited about it — is that actually exist a domestic-discipline lifestyle based in BDSM where spanking becomes an everyday punishment in order to magnify the D/s state of mind and get the “fantasy”(*insert here as many quotation marks as you want*) fully performed. I find extremely fun that at some point, as a result of a lifelong feminism and atheism unlearning-learning process, I could end up being a happily Catholic-disciplined wife who submits both God and men, now personalised in the same figure.

Fuck. This must be the ultimate feminist liberation or the most brilliant patriarchy capitalistic fem-washing ever. And I am afraid I am still sceptical about this self-empowering/neoliberal/individualist feminism whose mantra is that free will makes the gender hierarchy we all were raised into disappear. The hard reality is that as long as a your partner (and many others) keep on acting condescending in real life, you cannot be fairly sure — how can he even be — there is no misogyny behind his deepest and underlying desires which casually and very randomly involve to hit a woman till the exhaustion.

*Bonus stage: Everyone should be free to choose their own fantasy-based life-style but do not loosely call it fantasy, please. At least until I can have my personal fantasy-based life-style without having to wear a bloody skirt.