Image source: "Figurehead" artwork by Stahlber. You can find more like it here on his Deviant Art site.
I want to make it very clear that I am not picking a fight with all of feminism here. I think much of feminism has values that I share. I’m all for equal pay for equal work. I’m for women being able to make real choices about whether they work or not, and about the kinds of work they do. I think homemakers’ work should be recognized as an important contribution to society and compensated as such. I think free daycare for working couples should be a thing. I think the MeToo movement was a good thing and that there are many more abusive people who need to be affected by it in a direct and often punitive way. Overall, I think feminism has had a good effect on society and I hope it continues the good work.
But that doesn’t mean I agree with every tenet of feminism, in fact there are some I disagree with big time.
One of them is the feminists’ tendency to censor works of fiction they don’t like. I call feminists who favor censorship prudo-feminists, because they aren’t real feminists (“pseudo-feminists”) and they’re prudes. This particular branch of feminism, I have a problem with (and so do many others). Basically I think it’s wasted effort: much of the most convincing data points to the conclusion that access to taboo erotica, hell, access to hardcore porn, does not tend to lead to more rape and sexual harassment for women in the real world. In fact, readily available porn can and generally does lead to less real life rape and sexual harassment.
That’s not the issue I want to write about today. (I’ve written other screeds about the flaws in prudo-feminism, most notably this one. Give it a read, it’s very clear, though it covers much of the same ground covered here.)
Today I want to talk about the peculiar issue that bodice rippers pose for prudo-feminists. Feminism has always made it very clear that it aims to be a force for freedom for women, giving them more power and choices over their lives. Anything feminists do that runs counter to those principles should be viewed with deep suspicion.
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And of course censorship does limit the choice of women. It has been argued that in the case of visual porn that doesn’t matter much, because women don’t watch much visual porn. But Googling for the percentage of women who watch porn proved very sus. Not that Google was suspicious, but the sites reporting the figures were very often places with names like “Covenant Eyes” and “Fight the New Drug.” A quick examination of these sites revealed them to be NGOs dedicated to fighting porn and porn addiction. So whatever you think of their goals, it’s a safe bet they’re ginning the numbers toward high incidents of porn use/porn addiction among women because that’s how you get the big government grants to fight all that bad porn addiction you claim is out there ruining lives. (It’s the exact same scam the human trafficking NGOs have been running for decades, as per this post.)
I found figures ranging from 41 percent to 60 percent of women viewing porn, but I don’t believe them for the same reason I don’t believe human trafficking figures: the NGOs have ALL the reason to maximize the numbers. (One study cited a number of 76 percent among women between 18 and 30 years old, with a very small percentage of women over 50 viewing porn. This had some credibility since an age variance makes sense. But all the anti-porn NGOs just made the numbers sus to me.)
But regardless of the number of women who watch porn, there are a fuckton of women who read erotica. 98 percent of romance readers are female, and 88 percent of erotica readers are female. The numbers vary by a few percent from source to source but they all show that the vast majority of erotica readers are female.
(The numbers for the number of erotica writers just don’t exist. I saw several estimates, all of which showed that a majority of writers are female, though some showed that number as low as 51 percent while the majority of sites just kinda shrugged and waved their hands. There are no accurate numbers here, but it’s probably safe to assume a large majority of erotica writers are female.)
What’s more, most of those writers are self-published through Smashwords, Direct2Digital, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Kobo Adult, Apple Books, Everand and Gardners and with Amazon, which is by far the largest online book marketplace.
The point being the whole erotica business is largely owned and operated by and for women. There are some men involved, for example, I write erotica and some men read erotica, but we’re a small minority at best.
And that’s where the problem lies for prudo-feminists. They used to be able to “other” traditional publishers of erotica, because most traditional publishers like Harlequin were led by men at the top in the 80s and 90s. “Those big nasty men are publishing rape erotica to normalize rape so it will be easier to rape women” or some such bullshit was the line, though it was never expressed so baldly because it’s blatantly ridiculous. The prudo-feminists were happy enough to let people think about shady, powerful male publishers publishing bodice rippers because they’re evil males who like to tempt women to want to be raped by men.
This is also bullshit, it has alway been bullshit. The reason the male CEOs of these romance publishers sold bodice rippers was that there was a market for them among romance readers, and a hot one at that. They would not sell the books if they did not make money.
And of course now that the erotica market has largely become women writing sex fantasies for other women to enjoy without the intervention of male publishers, that argument is just meaningless.
And that is where the problem becomes most pointed for prudo-feminists, because it has forced them to go masks off in what they’re actually doing.
And what is it that they are doing?
Prudo-feminists are censoring other women’s sex fantasies, that’s what they are doing. They are saying, “You bad, evil, wrong women should not write those rape fantasy stories, and you other bad, wrong women should not buy them or read them!”
The prudo-feminists have become thought police for other women.
This is not really what you want to be doing if you claim you are all about expanding choice and freedom for women, since you are clearly diminishing freedom and choice for some women.
And the truth is, of course, that prudo-feminists have little or not interest in expanding freedom and choice for all women, just those whose sexual tastes align with theirs, or rather what they think women’s sexual tastes should be, which definitely does NOT include maledom/femsub kink.
This leaves them in a very vulnerable position with regard to their whole schtick as women’s liberators. They’re right on the same turf as the “social conservative women” who are mostly just utterly brainwashed women with religious backgrounds, unthinking puppets of the preists, pastors, imams or whatever that programmed them to submit their sexuality to whatever their particular brand of snake oil demands.
The prudo-feminists have attempted to justify the sexual fantasy policing of their sisters by claiming that women who have the gall to have maledom/femsub sexual tastes exist because they have “internalized misogyny.” They aren’t real, organic sexual feelings, they exist because some women have adopted misogynistic sexual fantasies as their own because they are the helpless, unknowing puppets of the Patriarchy©.
It’s blatantly “othering” women, defining the ones who like bodice rippers as some inferior subclass of women whose sexuality needs to be supervised by other, more sexually mature women, like prudo-feminists for instance.
This take has never gotten very far with women who are not prudo-feminists, since it’s such an obvious dodge to let some women act as sexual thought police over other women. (If you Google “internalized misogyny” you’ll find some academic papers on the topic, but if you look at the authors, it becomes evident that they’re just academic prudo-feminists.)
Most feminists don’t want to be policing other women’s sexual desires, or even to be SEEN as policing other women’s sexual desires. (OK, some lesbian feminists have claimed that women who are sexually attracted to men are maybe not real feminists, but everybody who wasn’t a wild-eyed lesbian feminist saw that crap for what it was and it never went very far.)
This is why prudo-feminists are not exactly at the forefront of feminism (though they continue to exist, ready to suppress other women’s sexuality if the least chance should arise). Other feminists with a more grounded approach have kept the prudo-feminists where they belong: sidelined and ineffective.
The thing we men and woman who like maledom/femsub sexuality in its various flavors need to take away from this is that we have a huge club to beat prudo-feminists over the head with when we encounter them. To wit: “Since most rape erotica is written by and for women and most rape erotica readers are women, you’re just suppressing other women’s sexuality. GTFOH with that garbage.”
And if they try that “internalized misogyny” crap, just tell them, “So do workers who keep voting for Republicans have internalized grifterism? Do socialists who favor free markets have internalized capitalism? C’mon, every single case where someone is doing something that others see as counter to their own ideology/interests can be viewed as a result of someone internalizing others’ values. GTFOH with that stuff. It’s just a cheap dodge to invalidate others.”
Checkmate, prudo-feminists.
You can get the book here on Amazon. Cover art is different but it's the book the Netflix series is based on.
