The entire discourse of "female masochism" and "male dominance versus
despotism" ignores the fact - as in all Elle Finn's posts on British Poets
and Elle's
web-site - that the equilibrium between passiveness/activeness,
masochism/sadism,
meekness/aggressiveness has ceased to be related to the supposed inflexible
order femininity/masculinity of the sexual and psychological relationship
between woman and man.
To attribute to women solely the "learned" desire to assume a submissive
role is manipulative towards a
forced radical feminist discourse.

One cannot  really believe that to enjoy submissiveness in
erotic practices is a sexual female psychological feature only- as Elle Finn
states in her
all her posts  and poems, revealing - in doing so - a degree of dicotomical
naivety ("from Elle's
poem. I quote: "I am your body, you are my soul" etc...).


Probably, some men still feel at risk of  "psychological castration"
if they discover in themselves a pleasure of this kind, a delight also in
sexual passivity , which
of course can occur also in aperfectly heterodox intercourse . But other
evidently don't.
When Dom describes his reaction
in front of feeling in love, he is actually using terms such as "vomiting"
and "shaking" -
which belong to the language of being "possessed" . He is refusing the
language
of the dominant male  as well as " the sensation of a blunt instrument (!)
bludgeoning through an ice sculpture."

And indeed he wrote:
> When I get caught by love, the symptoms are shaking and vomiting, an
urgent
> dispossession and rawness, but not - for me - the sensation of a blunt
> instrument bludgeoning through an ice sculpture...
>

So, for me, the discourse cannot be made dicotomical. And once this double
threshold
is acknowledge and crossed, one sees where the pathway takes you.
It does not lead you to the male sadistic offender only.

It is somehow Paleolithic to still believe in the kind
of sexual-psychological relationships between two individual of different
sex
in the terms of Elle Finn.
(as in Heanye's poems, "Act of love", for instance).

I believe that there is actually a huge number of men
who can imagine what is like to have a uterus (will all that this implies)
and for empathy, can even figure to have one,
without risking to feel on the verge of homosexuality, and who can enjoy
mothering their children, or even be
subjected to their wives' dominance if they happen to have a dominant
partner.
And anyhow, I am sure that men , in order to understand what their feamle
partners are experiencing  in bed with them
- might try to fantasize what means or imply to be receiving a penis.
As for me, my ability to judge other people's equilibriums , in these
contexts, vacillates.

I fear that what Dom is talking about belongs all together to a different
sphere: this is common criminality
with all the abhorrent nuances that a criminal mind (of a woman and of a man
indiscriminately)
 can find to express its evil  in all directions. But what caused that evil?
This is what society should
mainly be aware of and  take into account.
I have a neighbour friend who is a psychologist and a therapist.
She says that the huge majority of these offenders were sexually abused when
they were children in their turn
 (even more horribly so because they were molested by the mother or father
or people
who had easy access to them.) They learned the criminal  mode by being first
the victims of it).
She says that most often they present also other forms of associated
pathologies: they steal, make frauds, fight violently,
injure themselves intentionally, and try to abuse society in every possible
way with a degree of resentment and hanger which is sometimes bottomless).


Erminia



> One thing, though: her writing is very much about complicity; for her, the
> "female masochism" alleged by sexologists is complicity, and her most
> persistent demand is that *this* "masochism" (which is perhaps not
> sufficiently distinguished from other masochisms - a problem I'm still
> scratching my head over) be unlearned - as in self-defence classes, where
> the acting-out of violent scenarios is intended to train the body to
respond
> to aggression with assertion and violence (what I think of as the *good*
> kind: "yaah, you bastard, you didn't expect *that*, did you?") rather than
> cowering and self-abasement ("yeth, mathter..."). The latter is of course
a
> survival strategy, of considerable evolutionary pedigree, but it's not
much
> use as a survival strategy when the aggressor is in any case intent on
> murder.
>
> When I get caught by love, the symptoms are shaking and vomiting, an
urgent
> dispossession and rawness, but not - for me - the sensation of a blunt
> instrument bludgeoning through an ice sculpture...
>
> FLOS CAMPI
>
> i)
>
> Mine is an unquiet house.
> By night the guests carouse,
> sleep's plunderers, who reap
> love's wayward crop.
>
> So liberal the host
> in furnishing their feast,
> stripping the urgent stalk
> of heady bulk,
>
> by day the labourers,
> old hands, go to rehearse
> their pre-apportioned tasks
> among the husks.
>
> ii)
>
> Eros, black-marketeer,
> unquestionable shade,
> patron of snagging briar
> and ravaged bride
>
> battens on our decline,
> his humours duly drawn
> from undissenting spleen,
> relenting brawn;
>
> his tenderness at odds
> with our proportioned joys
> displacing from their beds
> the sleeping wise.
>
> iii)
>
> What words come to avail
> themselves of our distress,
> what arguments make trial
> of that abyss
>
> from which but echoes rise,
> rebutting our complaints
> with simulated cries,
> familiar taunts?
>
> Now let our thorough hands,
> so schooled in sweet pursuit,
> make summary amends
> for our disquiet.
>
> (1997)
>
> - Dom
>
>



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