Women on Leashes: Kink In The Public Eye

Ah, women being walked on leashes. One may have thought that since Snoop Dogg announced he is now going to respect women (having claimed that he only called them bitches and whores in the past because he didn't know any better, bless him) there'd be no more public displays of such imagery for anyone to get up in arms about. Yet this past week I ended up seeing two stories about this within a few days of each other, and since I've like, written a book on how BDSM is portrayed in pop culture and its implications for feminism, I thought it behooved me to take a closer look at these tales and how they're framed.

The first, a story on Complex.com, a pop culture news site, kicked off with the headline "Australian Playboy Calls Himself Candyman and Walks Women on Leashes." I have to say, before I encountered this story I had never heard of Travers Beynon, who is apparently "known as Australia's Hugh Hefner", so I'm immediately wondering if this piece is going to actually provide more of the oxygen of publicity to someone relatively unknown outside their native country. 

In somewhat prurient and scandalised tones, the article goes on to say "On Instagram, Beynon frequently posts photos from his multimillion-dollar "Candy Shop Mansion," where women who've auditioned to be his "angels" pose for photos, sometimes as furniture. There's this photo where women serve as chairs and tables for a game of chess. (How civilized!)" There follows a video where we can see plenty more exposed female flesh on show in Beynon's flashy mansion, including sushi being eaten off a naked woman's body, and a man (not Beynon, perhaps one of his staff?) walking two bikini-clad women on leashes, one of whom is apparently Beynon's wife. The reporter mentions that the grandparents of his wife are concerned that this is a 'toxic' environment for her two children. Beynon's defence is that he's a hardworking family man, and the imagery he's posting on Instagram are merely promotion for his tobacco company.

The reporter says "This is arguably not OK, and I'm glad that Beynon is coming under fire for posting pictures of human beings on leashes. While he claims that his wife is impressed by his lifestyle and is laughing her head off at all the media attention that his home is receiving, I still have to wonder if everyone in this photo [shows photo of three men sitting on the backs of women who are on all fours] is comfortable with what's going on."

There's a lot going on here, but as often seems to be the case, there's still a fairly predictable template being followed:

1) Get outraged at the treatment of women by X, while simultaneously giving more publicity to X and also showing as many pictures as possible of the supposedly degrading treatment and exposed butts, boobs, thighs, cracks and cleavages.

2) Dismiss the possibility that any of the women involved have agency and/or free choice.

3) Play the "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!" card

4) Impose own values on to the behaviour of consenting adults

If this seems like lazy 'choice' feminism to you, I think it's worth adding that I would love to live in a world where I never had to be assaulted by another bronzed female butt crack or cleavage on my TV, computer or in a magazine or on a billboard, ever, ever again. The commodification of the female form both sickens and exhausts me. I would love it if music videos were about music, adverts were about the products they were trying to sell, and that the biggest ripples in global news were caused by genuinely amazing events that indicated progress for the human race, rather than the fact that Kacey Cuomo has dyed her eyebrows pink. However, as a pop culture commentator, I know that's not the world we live in. Under capitalism, everyone's trying to hustle, and earn money the quickest way they can. For Travers Beynon, that way is apparently by running a tobacco company, buffing up his body til he resembles a condom full of walnuts, building a kitsch, gilded bubblegum palace of bling and babes, and showing it to the world. Apparently, it's working. There are still many men out there who secretly think Hugh Hefner has got it made, even though plenty more of us consider him a pretty sad and creepy old man unable to deal with women as equals. Beynon is apparently appealing to the first category through his Instagram account, and if he gets some public criticism along the way, well, it's just more exposure, right?

Then there's the women who participate in the supposedly oh-so-shocking pictures. We need to stop to consider that they may also be hustling the best way they see fit. Are we to assume they are in those pictures under duress? That they are coerced into the lifestyle they enjoy in the big blinging mansion? FFS, there are plenty of women who consent to be walked on leashes or serve as human furniture out in the real world, and if you go into a BDSM club or look on Fetlife you'll soon meet them. You'll find they're regular women with jobs, children, partners, bills to pay, and you'll find that they all choose to do what they're doing. They just don't turn up on Instagram for pop culture commentators to disapprove of in the name of feminism, but they remain adults in control of their own lives and I believe Beynon's female companions do too, even if the former group's actions may be more about private pleasure and the latter more about creating public ripples to ultimately generate more income.  

This brings me onto the second story which I saw on Jezebel a few days later, which tells a bit of a non-story about a couple who were asked to leave a New York mall because the man was walking his female companion on a leash. There's an accompanying photo of the woman, wearing a thick collar with large spikes, kneeling on the pavement. You can only see the legs of her male companion. She's fully clothed and smiling. I found it hard to know how to feel about the story because I generally fell between two stools - I couldn't fully agree with the outraged commentators who wrote "Keep it in the bedroom, assholes," or sarcastically referred to "the public degradation of another human, shockingly, and soo unexpectedly, a woman," or went straight for the "What about children who saw this?!" line (see how it keeps coming up? How much time and energy is expended on fretting about what kids might actually think when kids spend so little time thinking about anything than the Frozen song?), but nor could I get totally on board with the writer's groovy, laid-back, "I'm from San Francisco where anything goes," attitude which adds up to: what they were doing isn't inherently sexual, kids who saw the couple will understand it was just make-believe, and it's not as bad as some weird stuff she's seen in public, including a man defecating on her porch. Hmmmm.

Both stories raise the questions, which has reared its head again and again in my writing on kink, on how far it's acceptable to inflict BDSM play on a viewing public. In the case of the first story, I doubt that the instance of the women being walked on leashes has nearly as much to do with BDSM, as it does with getting as many hits as possible on Instagram. Maybe the man and two women in the picture are genuinely playing a kinky game that they all find pleasurable, but I somehow doubt it - it just comes across as too staged. The couple in the second story do seem more like they are enjoying the thrill of public play, inadvertently yet crucially showing how the hottest kink scenes can take place when everyone is fully clothed and there's not a bikini or bum crack in sight, but as someone points out in the comments, there's no way to get the consent of everyone who has to view them, and if some people find it offensive or upsetting, that goes against the SSC (safe, sane, consensual) or RACK (risk aware consensual kink) mantras that are the foundation of the BDSM community.

However, I think it's important to ask ourselves why these images are potentially offensive. In response to the commenter who calls the mall couple's act degrading, another commenter immediately calls them on their assumption that the leashed woman feels degraded rather than empowered. This simplistic statement also obscures the fact that there can be empowerment/pleasure/erotic thrills found in that which we are supposed to find degrading, precisely because they are roles which are considered humiliating and which we are therefore not supposed to desire. One wonders if there would have been similar outcry if the gender roles had been reversed, if a woman had been thrown out of a mall for walking a man on a leash (would that even have happened?), or if Travers Beynon was a female feathering her nest with a bevy of thong-clad men on leashes? I understand that it's not as simple as that, because we're not talking about a simple and equal switch of positions. There is no equivalent history to that of male violence against and oppression of women. There is no equivalent culture of objectification and dehumanisation of the male form. It's just not the same. People get uncomfortable seeing women in positions of sexual submission to men because it's too close to what is still sadly really going on out there at times - rape, sexual violence, sexual harassment, sexual coercion, enslavement, trafficking. But what is really, really important to remember is that the existence of the latter should not lead to the censorship or condemnation of the former. That does not help any of us. Treating content, consenting adult women like they need to be protected does not help protect the women who really are in danger. Assuming that women don't know what they really want or like and sneering oh my god how could they really be comfortable doing such a thing merely echoes the voices of misogynists who want to portray us as brainless playthings and then use that to excuse their violence against their female form. 

It's tricky, though. I'd still probably be on the side of the mall cop who thew the couple out, because I do believe in a time and a place for things, and I think it's disingenuous to imply that there isn't at least some kind of sexual element to collar/leash play. Even if it's not sexual for that particular couple, it's undeniably BDSM-themed, and definitely originates from a place that's going to be tricky to explain to kids - or, for that matter, a lot of older people (trying to explain the BDSM acronym to my mum, who's in her 60s, has been fun - she's asked me on about 6 occasions to remind her what it stands for and what it actually means). I don't subscribe to the argument that "Kids are going to see it and think that's how it's OK to treat women," because that kind of epistemic leap involves enough mental gymnastics when you're an adult, let alone for a child. Listening to The Prodigy's Firestarter at age 12 didn't make me believe that arson was a great idea, reading The Story of O at age 19 didn't make me think that it was normal or expected that a woman should run off and submit to a palace full of perverts, and no one or ten or hundred images makes a child think it's OK to treat a woman like crap. With regards to the mall couple, I do generally agree that it runs counter to BDSM ethics to inflict kink play on an unsuspecting public, although I wonder if Travers Beynon's Instagram feed comes with any kind of warning. I'd guess that the type of people who want to follow him are probably used to, ready for, or actively seeking the kind of images he puts out there. I probably have more truck with those criticising him, who are happy to reproduce his images with no kind of warning just so they can add a disapproving commentary, therefore giving more exposure to depictions of women that they claim to find demeaning.

***To read more essays on BDSM, feminism and pop culture, check out my new book "Thinking Kink," which is now out in the US and the UK. Available in both paperback and eBook***

BDSM and feminism: Kink-shaming and victim-blaming

Defending BDSM is a fraught process for feminists. On the one hand, you have misogynists and rape apologists telling you that women are just 'asking' to be assaulted, coerced, violated, beaten and raped, an insidious culture that makes any woman who enjoys consensual kink feel like she is a traitor all female victims of violence. On the other, you have (some) feminists telling you that while they support your right to choose whatever sexual practices you find pleasurable, if you like BDSM (especially as a submissive/masochist) it's probably just due to toxic patriarchal social conditioning and you should probably "work to change that" (genuine quote from a feminist discussing BDSM).

Then you have stories like the awful Jian Ghomeshi allegations that continue to emerge, whereby an alleged abuser is trying to mitigate the charges against him by claiming they took place under the umbrella of consensual kink. His accusers say differently. Rape apologists say "well, it's their word against his." Feminists say #IBelieverHer but suspect that these women are merely going to be dragged through the mill of being disbelieved, scrutinised and publicly attacked and possibly not see any justice at the end of it, because we know that's what happens to the majority of sexual assault victims. Radical feminists say What do you expect? and That's what happens when you say BDSM is OK, it becomes a cover for assault. Of course, there are quite a few radfems out there who believe that all BDSM is assault anyway, and that any woman who claims she consents to it is just brainwashed by the patriarchy into believing she actually wants to participate in this activity. 

This is where I encounter a particular logic fail with feminist criticism of BDSM. Does it not seem paradoxical to anyone else to be part of a movement that fights for women's right to be seen as full, autonomous, intelligent beings with agency while claiming that women who make sexual choices you don't agree with are too stupid to know what they're doing? As Margaret Hunt writes in her excellent "Report on a Conference on Feminism, Sexuality and Power: The Elect Clash with the Perverse," "leaps of logic like these only make sense if one really believes that adult women who choose to be the bottom in an S/M exchange are equivalent to children, while their tops are equivalent to pathological murderers." Yet it's not just the obvious corners of anti-sex work, anti-pornography, radical feminism that such viewpoints emerge. I was seriously disappointed to read this recent article by Emer O' Toole "This murder in Ireland has made me rethink my sexual practices," (The Guardian, 31st March 2015) where O' Toole claims that, despite having happily participated in BDSM previously, she now finds it difficult to reconcile with the fact a woman was murdered by a man she was in a BDSM relationship with. The tagline is "I wonder if we can continue to deny any links between kinky sex and wider societal abuse of women," the accompanying picture is a still from F**** S**** o* G*** and the caption to that claims that in that movie "a reluctant, inexperienced and infatuated young girl is controlled and beaten by a rich sadist" - read here to see why I believe that's a total mischaracterisation of that particular storyline.

From the outset of O' Toole's piece I got the sense that this was going to be yet another anti-kink article, this time more cleverly concealed than the usual feminist condemnation by the fact the author claims she is a BDSM practitioner. Sadly, I wasn't wrong. She starts by demanding that we examine "the social context that allowed a man to convince a woman that his sexual desire to stab and kill her was within the bounds of the acceptable," as if it's somehow a foregone conclusion that "social context" was what drove Graham Dwyer to murder his partner. This is followed by an epistemic leap so vast it requires a parachute to accompany it, when O' Toole says that this means we also need to pay "attention to the cultural mainstreaming of BDSM."

I probably should have stopped reading there, because my responses were already descending into teenage grunts. My response to that particular sentence was Why? and Says who? After the Columbine killings, hysterical hand-wringers told us to look to Marilyn Manson and violent films/video games for the source of the senseless violence that two 15 year-olds visited upon their classmates and teachers. Anyone with half a brain said no, I will not resort to such blind, simplistic scapegoating. Music doesn't kill people, video games don't kill people. And consensual play with ropes, floggers, gags and cuffs doesn't cause the rape and murder of women, Whenever we blame anything but the rapist for the rape, the murderer for the murder, we shift responsibility from the criminal and to something else (sadly, as happens far too often in the case of sexual assault, we shift it on to the victim). If you're a feminist, you know that short skirts, drinking and flirting don't cause rape. So why are you suddenly training your sights on PVC outfits and erotic power play and claiming that they are responsible for domestic violence and murder?

Partly because it's an interesting and trendy thing to be talking about, I guess, in light of *that film* and *that book*'s popularity, otherwise I doubt The Guardian would have commissioned O' Toole's piece, But her supposedly kink-friendly feminism is just woman-shaming and kink-shaming in a leather disguise. She says "I’m making this critique not as a kink-shamer, but as a challenge to myself: what are my reasons and justifications for inviting or accepting male sexual violence?" Again, the teenager in me responds WHO CARES? Not because I'm being rude or dismissive, but because funnily enough, as a feminist, I don't think we should be asking women to put a disproportionate amount of weight and stress upon themselves by interrogating their desires any more than anyone else does in this society. Why is it always on us as women to analyse ourselves, to scrutinise ourselves, and, according to the great Radical Feminist Handbook of How Acceptable Egalitarian Sex should be done, probably find ourselves wanting? Wherefore the privilege of the unexamined life, the unapologised-for libido? Isn't that something men enjoy? So why are we demanding that women give that up and instead flagellate ourselves (pun so very intended) for the things that give us pleasure in this so-often thankless and joyless life?

Citing one study about self-proclaimed porn addicts as evidence that porn creates a desire for violence (if you read the article, it actually only states that people who are predisposed to already enjoy looking at violent porn tend to seek it out - shocker), O' Toole accepts on one hand that kink gives people a safe space to enjoy desires that are not acceptable to release in everyday life, but then demands that we never forget that a racist, sexist, transphobic, ableist society is still sitting in the kink club with us. Does she really think that any one, apart from those in the most privileged social groups, can ever forget that fact? So why is she asking that we continue to beat ourselves over the head with guilt about the fact our BDSM practices may resemble sexist, racist, transphobic or ableist violence (I remember reading about a disabled man who liked to be called 'cripple' and dragged out of his chair and abused during kink scenes - his play may shock me and many people, but that itself is not reason enough for me to tell him he should not be doing it). What reason is there, apart from the fact that this one horrible murder has clearly made O' Toole feel guilty about her own sexual practices, to demand that we start "conscientiously examining a) the social conditions that have led to our fetishisation of female pain and submission, and b) the ways in which our sexual practices strengthen and reinforce those social conditions?" These very statements imply to me that despite claiming to be a BDSM practitioner, O'Toole has not thought very long or hard about kink or feminism. She assumes there must be a social basis for the desires of any woman who enjoys pain or submission, yet that assumption pretty much at one fell swoop disregards all female sexual agency, the existence of female switches and male submissives, and women who feel their submissive desires exist in spite of, not because of, their upbringing (quote Mollena Williams: "I was taught that being strong was the first thing you had to be, especially ... as a black woman. To be submissive, to be obedient, was NOT acceptable.")  There is also, of course, the underlying assumption that O' Toole's own viewpoint is objective and neutral, rather than coloured, as everyone's must be, by their own experiences and background. As Margaret Hunt writes, in a statement that could be applied to every radical feminist condemnation of women's sexual practices, "The argument that there is no free choice in the world is never all-inclusive. It always admits the existence of a small group which is morally superior to the corrupt mass." And that is where the logic fail happens. If O' Toole believes we are all so easily brainwashed, then how come she has magically managed to avoid the same fate as the rest of us? What exactly is it about her that makes her qualified to say that women's choice to participate in BDSM is somehow linked to, possibly even partially responsible for, one terrible murder? 

If we really want to look at things that have left women likely to be murdered by partners, we could look at: cuts to domestic violence services, slow legal machinery that mean getting injunctions and getting a violent partner removed from the family home could take days or even weeks (now thankfully much improved), victim-blaming narratives ("Why didn't she leave?" "She must have provoked him") and a culture of silence around domestic violence - the very term implies a "private matter" or "just a domestic," a language that seriously needs to change. BDSM did not kill Elaine O' Hara, and I take massive offence at O' Toole's last statement, that O' Hara's "submissive desires left her vulnerable to male aggression in the most tragic way possible." The only thing Elaine O'Hara's submissive desires left her open to, it would seem, was having her sexual preferences blamed for her death rather than her murdering partner. I'll say it again - if you wouldn't blame a short skirt for rape, then don't blame BDSM for a murder. BLAME THE MURDERER. O' Toole is criticising BDSM for somehow making it easier for abuse to go undetected - even though plenty of abuse goes undetected, excused or apologised for in the vanilla world - yet she is playing by the same rulebook of rape apologists by implying that Elaine O'Hara "left herself open" to getting murdered just because she was a submissive.

This is pretty disgusting. It's also ignorant - it disregards the many lengths submissives and masochists go to to protect themselves, precautions that many vanilla people don't bother to take when meeting someone for a date (arranging a 'check-in' call with a friend, letting someone know the name, online username, address of the person you're meeting), it assumes that "submissive as part of kink" = "weak in everyday life" (and anyone making that assumption will get a big, rude shock when they meet some actual subs) and, as I've pointed out above, it presumes that there are things women can and should be doing to protect themselves from male violence. But what could Elaine O' Hara have done? Not been married to this man? Right, well, perhaps it's marriage we should be protesting against, not BDSM. But then she might still have met this man, or dated him, or worked with him, or just walked past him one night in the street. And he still might have violently murdered her. So the best she could do is move to a remote island with no men on, right? Funnily enough, no one ever suggests that. Because that would be silly, that would be extreme. But saying that enjoying a spanking from your partner means you contributed to your own murder? That's fine to say. Even from someone who claims to be feminist, who claims to be pro-kink.

So, no, I'm not going to accept that I am obliged to examine my sexual practices and consider how they contribute to a society that blames rape and murder victims for their own violations, because I think the only thing which contributes to such a society is the belief that it's always down to women to change, behave differently and re-wire ourselves, because that belief is predicated on the mistaken idea that there's anything we can do to avoid violation, and that belief in turn - however well-meant - comes from a solid landscape of victim-blaming. So I let (read: asked) a guy pull my hair, put his hand round my throat, slam me against a wall - so the fuck what? Does it make feminists like O'Toole feel better if they know that this took place with my full consent and enthusiastic desire, while in my own home, wearing clothes of my own choice, that the wall I got slammed against belongs to me, and I paid for it with my own money, that the guy and I laughed and chatted and drank Um Bongo before and after it took place? Does it help if I add that I've never experienced any coercive sexual behaviour from any of the men I've practised BDSM with, whereas I know plenty of women who've experienced the same in vanilla relationships? Do you know, I don't care if it does - because I shouldn't be obliged to state these things just to make my preferences sound 'acceptable' to the feminist anti-kink police. Because what I do in my sex life, however unpalatable or odd it may seem to others, is not hurting anyone, and is bringing me freedom and pleasure. Fuck anyone who tries to shame me for that by using a woman's horrific death as their excuse.

***To read more essays on BDSM, feminism and pop culture, check out my new book "Thinking Kink," which is now out in the US and the UK.***