Default Heterosexual Sadomasochism

Social construction or human nature?

In my last post I argued that women who want to participate in casual sex should consider whether they’re assertive enough to exit these situations, even when doing so will be awkward or contentious. If they’re not, they should either work on that, or should be cautious about the conditions that must be met for them to engage. Perhaps they should only have sex with casual partners in controlled situations with explicitly agreed upon norms (like at an Aella sex party). 

That said, I agree that men shouldn’t make women uncomfortable by selfishly attempting to pressure them into sex that they don’t want to have. Men are now, I think, held to a higher bar than they were when I was growing up. The first time I watched Superbad I barely noticed the questionable approach to consent implied when Jonah Hill’s character says “you know when you hear a girl saying like “ah, I was so shit-faced last night, I shouldn’t have fucked that guy”... we could be that mistake!” I still laugh when I watch the clip, but I don’t think this line would land the same in 2024. And I generally think this is a good thing, and that something like enthusiastic consent norms are appropriate in a sexually liberal culture. 

Since men enjoy casual sex more than women do, they ought to be for making the conditions around casual sex as appealing as possible to the women they want to engage with, which includes norms that allow women to feel more comfortable being alone with men they don’t know well. In my view, men who pressure women into sex are behaving unethically, albeit clearly legally, and they should receive social disapproval for this behavior. 

While my argument was reminiscent of Camille Paglia in her heyday, I don’t actually think she and I are wholly aligned on the optimal norms here. Paglia has called ‘Yes means Yes’ laws “drearily puritanical and literalistic as well as hopelessly totalitarian.” While I agree that attempts to make affirmative or enthusiastic consent the basis for legal sex are “hopelessly totalitarian”, as a norm, I don’t see them as “drearily puritanical”. As I said above, enthusiastic consent norms seem at least supportive of, if not required for, a functional, sexually liberal culture. 

But, I interpret enthusiastic consent as something you can obtain/communicate without literally having a verbal check-in at every stage of the interaction (and from a quick search it seems that most definitions include a phrase like “Consent can be given by words or actions”, emphasis mine). My only issue with these more stringent consent norms is when they’re used to define the legal bar for sex rather than suggested as a condition for ethical sex, or when they’re misapplied to committed relationships where they’re totally irrelevant (or at least should be). For instance, I recently came across a tweet asking if the below Reddit post was cute or problematic: 

The responses on Twitter were almost entirely in agreement that it was cute and that the people debating this on Reddit have either never been in a relationship or are hopelessly woke-brained. But it’s a good reminder that the conversation regarding consent is almost entirely focused on norms made for frat parties. When inexperienced, horny young people get hammered and have sex with each other, strict, “unsexy”, “puritanical” consent rules are a best practice. But in a relationship with a trusted partner this really shouldn’t come up! 

In her interview with

Tyler Cowen

, Amia Srinivasan discussed why consent has such a prime place when it comes to sexual relations relative to other intimate interactions:

But think about all of the times you interact with — I don’t know — a really old friend. Your old high school or college buddy loses a child, and you put your arm around them, and you console them — something we haven’t done a huge amount of under the pandemic. You don’t ask for that consent. You don’t ask for consent to be able to put your arm around your buddy.

The reason is because the nature of your relationship as friends involves a fine attunement to your friend’s desires and needs and wants. You don’t go into that interaction with the friend thinking, “I want something that they might not want.” There isn’t a kind of implicit presupposed mismatch of desires or wants. It’s not a contractual exchange. It’s not a negotiation. You wouldn’t want to put your arm around your friend if that’s not what your friend needed at that moment.

The very fact that we have such an emphasis on consent when it comes to sexual relations, I think, reveals a certain set of background conditions about how we interact sexually, which is to say, there are lots and lots of cases where one party basically wants to have something that the other person doesn’t really want, in some sense, to give, where there is a misalliance. 

I think she’s right about the state of things, that “there are lots and lots of cases where one party basically wants to have something that the other person doesn’t really want, in some sense, to give”. But while Srinivasan attributes this to equilibrium to living under patriarchy I see it as more likely a result of our evolved natures. We typically imagine a man trying to convince a woman to have sex with him rather than the other way around. This is, in part, because men tend to desire casual sex more and generally get more out of those experiences. But it also has to do with the nature of men’s and women’s desires. 

Men prototypically desire a woman and her body directly, while women prototypically desire being desired by a desirable man. In romance novels there are often florid descriptions of the man’s rippling abs, sure, but the real fantasy revolves around the highly attractive man’s irrational and all consuming desire for the woman. In her Twilight video, Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints) discusses Default Heterosexual Sadomasochism (DHSM), “the division of sexuality into bipolar roles”, where the man is assumed to be the pursuer and the woman is assumed to be the pursued. The man desires and the woman is desired:

While both men and women generally prefer a situation where the other party desires them, many more men than women are nevertheless able to enjoy sex with a partner who consents, but does not strongly desire them. This is likely one more reason, among many, why women are so much less likely to patronize sex workers. In an episode of Minds Almost Meeting Agnes Callard and Robin Hanson discuss the sexual incompatibility that theoretically arises “if you assume that the characteristic erotic desire is wanting to be wanted”. But in reality there is often no incompatibility given that asymmetric desires underpin typical heterosexual sex. 

Srinivasan takes this further in her interview with Tyler saying that “To put it really crudely, lots of people are turned on by the fact that another person, in some sense, doesn’t really want to have that sex, so then the ritual of consent becomes necessary.” Srinivasan’s statement is gender neutral, but while it’s pretty clear that the man is typically the one doing the pressuring when it comes to heterosexual sex the reverse happens more than you might think. Survey results show a 1 in 14 incidence rate of men being “made to penetrate” with 79% of these men reporting female perpetrators. Regardless, the default gendered dynamic tends to map on to real life experiences.

Where I differ from both Srinivasan and Wynn is in the degree to which I think this dynamic is socially constructed. I can certainly see the argument. Portrayals of heterosexual sex so commonly eroticize themes of male dominance and female submission, man as the pursuing predator and woman as the pursued prey, that when this concept is first presented it’s easy to buy. My initial reaction in my undergrad gender studies class was something like “WOW they got us! They convinced us strong and independent women to eroticize our own subjugation and reify the belief that a woman’s most important attribute is her ability to elicit the desire of men.” 

But then you have to wonder… who is this “they” anyways, and why do “they” have this goal of selling us content that we have to be socialized to like? Perhaps, it’s not that society instructs men to be violent and sexually aggressive towards women but actually that society hems them in. From Camille Paglia’s essay, Rape and Modern Sex War¹:

Aggression and eroticism are deeply intertwined. Hunt, pursuit, and capture are biologically programmed into male sexuality. Generation after generation, men must be educated, refined, and ethically persuaded away from their tendency toward anarchy and brutishness. Society is not the enemy, as feminism ignorantly claims. Society is woman’s protection against rape.

In the past, I also placed more importance on how the eroticization of male dominance and female submission interacts with purity culture. For a woman who grows up in a culture that places a high value on female chastity, non-consent or “ravishment” fantasies may be attractive because they allow her to erotically indulge without guilt. Wynn discusses this idea as “disavowal” in her video when talking about the continued popularity of the “bodice ripper” genre of romance novels.

As the cover says… she could give it to him or he would take it from her!

But if these desires are purely socially constructed, then why does it seem like women express them even more now, in our liberal sexual culture, than they did in the past? If anything, it seems to me that as women have been liberated from Victorian ideals of feminine asexuality, and as sex has become safer (because of the shifting norms I mentioned at the outset as well as a much higher chance of being believed should a woman report a sexual assault) they’re more likely to express desire for aggressive sex.

At least judging from women run podcasts, enjoyment of choking, and other expressions of male dominance, are treated as run of the mill female preferences. Increased gender equality does not seem to have reduced the tendency for women to eroticize their own submission. And online, I see liberal feminist women lamenting the lack of assertive feminist men. Women seem to desire assertive masculinity, they just want it packaged without the misogyny! For example, survey results from

Aella

indicate that younger women (in her audience as well as among paid respondents) are much more likely to rate violent or degrading sex acts highly, e.g. “light choking”:

Of course, some feminists would point to depictions of female submission in porn, and assert that porn not only reflects but instructs the subjugation of women. From Amia Srinivasan’s essay, Talking to My Students About Porn²: 

For porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate. Porn trains. It etches deep grooves in the psyche, forming powerful associations between arousal and selected stimuli, bypassing that part which pauses, considers, thinks. Those associations, strengthened through repetition, reinforce and reproduce the social meaning assigned by patriarchy to sexual difference.

And Aella’s survey results do also indicate that younger men and women were exposed to porn earlier. She also finds that frequent porn use is positively related to women’s ratings of violent sex acts and to a lesser extent to men’s predictions of how women would rate these activities. Below is her plot of porn usage vs. women’s reported preference for “light choking” and men’s predictions of women’s preference:

And the below plot shows that younger cohorts were exposed to porn at an earlier age:

I suspect that the preference for these particular signifiers of male sexual domination are largely the result of porn “etching deep grooves in the psyche” but also that porn tends to consistently depict these general themes because consumers have a deep desire for them. Perhaps as sex in general has become far less taboo, access to porn has risen and depictions of sex in film and television have become more explicit, young people have become attracted to more extreme signifiers of domination.

When sex outside of marriage was subversive, all on its own, women likely didn’t need to experience mock violence to feel a thrill. So maybe Paglia was on to something when she theorized that “whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind”³. Still, the fact that most of this media is created by men lends some credence to Srinivasan’s claim that it tends to “reinforce and reproduce the social meaning assigned by patriarchy to sexual difference.”

But even romance novels, which are produced almost entirely by women for women, continuously reproduce these themes. Of course, romance novels are written within our current, Srinivasan would say patriarchal, cultural context. But, it seems quite telling to me that the popularity of the “powerful and aggressive man somewhat forcibly chooses the unassuming woman” story line hasn’t flagged at all in light of women’s increasing political, economic and sexual freedom.

Pure social constructionist feminists, who doubt the non-social reality of sex differences, are left in a somewhat difficult position. On the one hand, they don’t want to stigmatize anyone’s preferences, so long as those preferences don’t violate anyone else’s consent. They do not want to reinforce feelings of guilt and shame around sex and desire, particularly for women. But on the other hand, if DHSM is the result of socially constructed beliefs which further the subjugation of women, isn’t a failure to examine and challenge these preferences anti-feminist? Srinivasan, in her coda The Politics of Desire⁴, asks:

Is there no difference between “telling people to change their desires” and asking ourselves what we want, why we want it, and what it is we want to want? Must the transformation of desire be a disciplinary project (willfully altering our desires in line with our politics)—or can it be an emancipatory one (setting our desires free from politics)?

Ultimately, for me, the answer to “why do we want what we want?” is not likely to be “because we were socialized to want this through living under patriarchy”. The apparent fact that women’s interest in the eroticization of male dominance and female submission hasn’t waned in response to what I see as a very meaningful trend towards female empowerment too strongly indicates otherwise.

As a utopian feminist, Srinivasan would likely say that we simply don’t have the requisite empirical information to make such a claim, since while there are certainly differences in how gender equal societies are across time and place, she doesn’t “think these differences are profound enough to be able to give us any deep sense of what it would look like to do something that many feminists like [her] would like to do, which is abolish gender as such.”

This claim is unfalsifiable, but I doubt it. While I agree that there are still reasonably strong gender norms even in the most gender equal societies (like the Nordic countries) I don’t buy the claim that we can’t get “any sense” of human nature and sex differences from the cross-cultural and cross-time comparisons we have available.

But, maybe it doesn’t matter anyways. The degree to which feminists have a responsibility to examine and challenge the source of their desires depends on whether they actually contribute to the subjugation of women outside of the bedroom. And if young women, who seem to reject the idea that they need men, or are subordinate to men, are the most likely to clearly express these desires, I doubt there’s a meaningful link. Regardless, for what it’s worth I’d predict that both women and men would continue to find themes of dominance and submission erotic, even in the feminist utopia.

1. Paglia, Camille. “Rape and Modern Sex War.” Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism, Pantheon Books, 2017, pp. 54.

2. Srinivasan, Amia. "Talking to My Students About Porn." The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, pp. 64.

3. Paglia, Camille. “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art.” Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism, Pantheon Books, 2017, pp. 6.

4. Srinivasan, Amia. "Coda: The Politics of Desire." The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, pp. 100.