when women look powerful, it’s “okay” to hurt them. Female villains are ideal, since their strength counts for feminism but also they deserve to be hurt. FYI, if they “valiantly” control “silicon” or were popular in high school, they’re evil.
Even this is reductive. Because kink is mostly depicted in discrete traits and communicable acts, private, idiosyncratic fetishes—she rolls her eyes like that, he bites his lip like this, she was such a dork in high school after her parents’ divorce and now she writes poetry and works at Sephora—are ignored, except by Murakami. But in long-term relationships, these narratives predominate and become staggeringly complex. That’s how you stay interested in someone, you go out in the forest and you name all the animals, you rewrite reality into a folie à deux, that sweetly narcissistic take on good old sexual selection: “Aww, you’d do that? For me?”
These semantics are unimportant except as they clarify the underlying logic of fetish. Why do innocuous traits become sexualized? Secrecy and intimacy—you’re the only one who knows these things [about your partner], you’re the only one who can do these things [to your partner], you have a power that no one knows, you’re being someone you’re not supposed to be—Taboo is what separates the private from public.
this vast infrastructure to give men what they want, doesn’t. Not because pop kink shows consent poorly or autotunes S&M—those are academic complaints—but because it makes domming into an expectation, into another performance of gender at which men must measure up. Forget the rising male insecurity about “nice” as a slur—even for bad boys, the greater the checkboxing of power, the more it feels like like submission. Of course there is pleasure in doing unfreedom well, and some men have put in the hours, acquired a taste, and scored the associated plaudits; and maybe they would have liked it anyway, who knows? Both sexes play house with the dolls of a past generation. There is no outside view.
For each willing man, however, two have recoiled, and society now has to deal with an influenza of working-age NEETs going on disability and protest-fapping to anime crossdressers. Compare the feminine Pornhub searches above to those more popular among men: milf, step mom, step sister, hentai, 3D, VR, overwatch. What’s the theme? I’ll accept “femdom-y comfort” (incest, heroines), “no male competition” (POV, Freudians), or “stuff you can’t thinkpiece about” (= still taboo), but the most salient trend is that they are fake, maximum pretense: you know that’s not his mom, right?
That’s his edge. When your sweetheart says, “Fuck me like you hate me,” it takes a few seconds to register and then you must choose. You can decline, if you’re a fucking pussy. You can go through the motions, though it won’t be convincing and you don’t want to, not during intimacy with the one person who’s supposed to be an escape from faking it. But how can you convince yourself to hate her? You’re supposed to turn off your childhood values and tune out the buzzwords that are blasted from propaganda screens 24/7 and reduce her to orifices deserving of loathing and spit in her mouth and squeeze her carotids and call her a worthless slut?
The honest move is to hate her for asking. For femdoming you into dominating her. For using you. For forcing you to be a man, not just here and now, but in the thousand microscopic acts of toxic masculinity necessary to put her into your bed. You hate her for her hypocrisy: for being so progressive, for looking so powerful, and yet still being—you tell yourself—programmed to submit.
And that’s the endgame, the single byte of privacy that can never be stripped, the only inexhaustible source of desire in a hyperreality: the fetish for the lie itself. It’s like watching an awesome gangbang and suddenly noticing all the empty Oxycontin bottles and that they’re speaking Serbian.
Library of Chadnet | wiki.chadnet.org