I have nothing to be ashamed of, and damn the powers that be which tell me this isn’t so.

This morning I read an article by Violet Blue about how female ASMR performers are being categorized and targeted as adult entertainers and so defunded by PayPal, Patreon, and shut out of YouTube. It’s an excellent read and I highly recommend it. Why does this matter? Let me count the ways as I take a stroll down the well worn path of Misogyny Lane…

Financial institutions stealing money from working women, non-white, and queer people is just one of the many things that has happened this past year (and historically) to undermine the power women and minorities have over our own bodies and lives. Banks and financial institutions have the power to restrict individual people for pretty much any reason which is what enables, even incentivizes, other industries to follow suit. Politicians are in bed with financial institutions, and they absolutely pave the way for discrimination, unfair treatment, and bigotry.

What’s kink got to do with it? Most of my Pro Dom clients are people who want to feel taken care of, enact being submissive, wear women’s underwear, or are straight up masochistic and can’t find what they need at home. Most of these people are men (we’ll get to that in a moment). Following my own journey through masochism, as someone assigned female at birth (AFAB), helped me to undo a lifetime of instilled mistrust in my body. It turns out I can take a punch, feel pain, and survive. I can even sensually enjoy it! With this increased sense of survival comes a deeper trust in my own body and myself. My core grows stronger, I am able to more confidently go after what I want in life, I’m freer to leave behind transgressions put upon me by society and my communities. I become less controllable and more independent. I have more energy to speak my mind, to organize, to continue learning… This is an example of what it can look like for a female person to break free from the mythological limitations they’ve been trained to believe in since birth.

I’ve been called crazy more than a few times in my life, mostly by men who saw me do something difficult or heard me speak up on an issue which made them uncomfortable (this list includes some trans men and butch women within the past 20 years too). I am feminine. I don’t deny this even though I prefer not to be categorized as such — it’s just what most people see in me when they look. I’m also fairly masculine, androgynous on my best days, and I love each of these parts of myself. That femininity is not inherently understood to be, among other attributes, a “practiced resilience”, is a disservice to the idea and ideal of femininity itself. It is even a foundation from which misogyny grounds itself upon. It may be terrifying to those who would align themselves predominantly with their masculinity, and therefore believe themselves to be “tougher” than those perceived feminine (conflated with “female”), when a feminine person shows their strength, resilience, and lack of fear about painful events. A healthy femininity is not a fragile body, heart, or mind.

So, what does a healthy masculinity look like? It’s certainly not machismo, misogyny, red pill rhetoric, or a patriarchally perpetuated masculinity. We animated bags of dirt, are whole. Feminine, androgynous, and masculine, all. To enslave one’s identity toward one facet of their experience and restrict all other desires and needs in order for one to appear to “pass” as “masculine enough” for patriarchal privilege, is a disservice to the miracle of being alive. We each have one body, one intellect, and a full range of emotions on our side. We each maintain an ability to train and retrain synapses within our brains an infinite number of times between birth and death. To utilize these assets we must continue to think critically, observe anew, question, and learn throughout our lives.

Back to my clients — the ones who are masculine or male identifying, yet still desire to be taken care of, explore submission, wear pretty things, and succumb to pain at the hand of a woman or feminine being. Imagine if their workplaces, friends, or families knew of their longing to experience and express femininity and “feminine things”. Might they lose their jobs? Be ridiculed? Murdered? Lose their lives as they know them, their families, and homes? Our cultural mythology says yes. News headlines and statistics throughout history concur. Political, financial, and social acts of misogyny reinforce our society’s expectations of patriarchal rule largely through instilling fear in all people about what might happen when one steps outside of compliance. We are not allowed to be our most authentic whole selves. AMAB people who desire expressions of femininity can expect to lose their livelihoods (if not lives), and women and minorities who unshackle themselves from a fearful and disempowered state can expect to be robbed, silenced, institutionalized, raped, and worse. There is no money and no structural incentive for those in power to support their citizenry in being whole.

Poor people are more controllable due to being stressed out, underfed, overworked, and less available to speak out and organize against the powers that be. Poor people often subscribe heavily to opiates of the masses — drugs, drink, television, video games, and other forms of intellectual depressants or escapism for the salvation of their struggling hearts and bodies. Middle class people fear losing what they have and becoming poor. For women and minorities to constantly be the target of governmental, financial, workplace, and social discrimination, and for these people to be held accountable to a different, usually more extreme, degree of consequence than groups which reflect patriarchal values, is absolutely not coincidental. This week’s news of the strange-yet-exceptional punishment of censorship paired with taking performers’ income away, in the name of stopping the disconnected yet very real practice of child rape and sex trafficking, is very important to pay attention to. It is an insidious act and practice. It is malign. It is absolutely against free speech. It is a dangerous and troubling conflation of ethics which further endangers realtime victims, doing nothing to solve the problem it cites as taking on in the first place. It is anti-American.

This is the United States we are living in right now. They are not only coming after me, a queer-female-trans-sex-worker-loudmouth-artist, in time they are coming after you too. Take a moment for internal introspection: how much fear and self-repression has society already instilled within you (or within the people you care for) in the name of playing along for external gain? How much of your soul have you sold? How many of your heart’s desires have you forgotten? What percentage of yourself has fear inspired you to let go of?

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

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