So, I was idly thinking about the unexpected hotness of my friend kneeling in church, and thus about men kneeling in general, and then I suddenly remembered Tenchu.
Tenchu is a game where you play a ninja and sneak around killing people. I looooved it. I’m not a shoot-em-up fan, so creeping round and trying not to get caught was much more up my alley.
Anyway, in the first mission you have to make your way through a town to meet your master, Lord Gohda. Only of course the town is crawling with bad guys, and you have to have to carefully make your way through, picking them off one at a time. If you play the guy ninja, Rikumaru, you get a cut scene at the end of the level where he arrives at the meeting place, falls straight to his knees before his lord, and begs his forgiveness for being late.
He fights his way through crowds of enemies, risking his life every step of the way, then falls to his knees and apologies for being late.
And I was like, ‘Yeah! That’s how it’s done!’
The Japanese feudal paradigm involves total submission – but it’s the least wimpy thing ever. Every samurai owes total loyalty and obedience to his lord, and expects complete perfection of himself. Not only is he prepared to die in battle for his lord at any point, he is also prepared to offer his own sepukku for failing to complete a task satisfactorily, or just to save his lord embarrassment. And we’re not just talking about the big tough killing machines, here – theoretically women and children are also prepared to commit seppuku if their lord requires it.
Total submission. The opposite of wimpy.
The European feudal paradigm isn’t exactly wimpy either, even though it’s not quite as hardcore. Sure, we don’t have seppuku. But the point about knights is that they owe total allegiance to their lord, and every man in the system owes allegiance to someone, right up to the dukes. Like a kind of d/s pyramid scheme. And we really, really don’t think of medieval warriors as wimpy.
So, historical models of submission = practically the definition of brave and admirable.
So why does the world think mansubs are wimpy?
The answer is pretty obvious. Samurai and knights submit to other men. Mansubs submit to women.
Which is levels of sexism that make me want to hand in my humanity membership card.
But it’s true. Any suggestion that a man is governed by a woman is considered emasculating. And yet a man’s submission to another man is the pinnacle of courage and virtue.
You know, there were samurai who wouldn’t even have sex with women because they considered even that contact emasculating – they shagged men instead.
And how about the knights? Well, let’s look at our model for knights serving women – the concept of courtly love. Eleanor of Aquitaine invented the game of courtly love as a means of stopping all those hormone-ridden young knights from harrassing her ladies. She modelled it on the relationship between a knight and his lord, in that the knight was supposed to make himself a servant of the lady, she was supposed to be in total control. But he was supposed to worship her from a distance. There was no sex involved, oh no – in fact that’s practically the point. Instead, he adores her from afar, puts her on a pedestal, sees her not as a human being, but as an icon, a goddess, and his dearest wish is to endeavour to deserve the smallest glance from her.
See, this ‘kiss my boots but don’t fuck me’ bullshit started a really long time ago.
(As I’m sure you’ll have noticed, I’ve used ‘mansub’ throughout to mean ’straight mansub’ – for which, apologies, but it was snappier. Of course, it would prove my theory quite neatly if we found that gay mansubs suffer less prejudice than straight ones. Anyone know whether this is the case?)
I can definitely say that in the realm of fiction, M/m stories are often the ones that have proved to be enjoyable to me without containing too many off-putting downers. On the one hand, because I find M/m setups sexy in themselves, and also because usually there I don’t have to deal with ridiculous portrayals of female characters and arousal-killing inbuilt sexism. Occasional downers in M/m stories include, sadly, instances of general misogyny, sort of as an overreaction by the author to heteronormative ideology. All the greater is my joy of course when I come across a tale with F/m DS that is not built to turn women off.
Regarding the Japanese concept of samurai loyalty, the fictional portrayal of such a relationship I’ve enjoyed most so far is a story of two female characters. There’s no BDSM in there, but there is devotion, submission, eroticism, romance, love, sex, comedy, adventure, fighting and horror. The noble lady starts out as a girlish spoiled aristocrat with plenty of room for character development. The samurai is reticent and completely trapped in convention at the beginning – she doesn’t stay like that either. So far the series has six stories, starting with Azumaya: The Eastern House. I hope the author will soon write the next one.
Kwaidan: Supernatural Tales of the Floating World (A Series Set in a Fantastic Ancient Japan) by Nene Adams
This was rather a detour from the original point of your post. Yes, many portrayals of F/m suffer heavily from sexist thinking. “Oh no, this is not just person A submitting to person B, it’s a man submitting to a woman, so it has to be adorned with all sorts of gender-related clichés and tropes.” I prefer to start at the basic “person A submits to person B” level. Basic thinking about DS needs more gender mainstreaming, enabling room for submission and dominance, (in our real lives and in fictional portrayals), as individual expressions.
Regarding prejudices or not against gay submissive men, I suppose it depends where you look and who you’re talking to.
There’s already plenty of prejudice around in my society and yours against just being gay in general – never mind kink. For example, I certainly see plenty of homophobia among some straight submissive men. Every time a submissive man apparently thinks he has to assure me “I’m not gay” I’m thinking “What the hell? I’m a dominant hetero woman. Does that somehow make you assume that I’m homophobic?” This assumption can really ruin an otherwise interesting conversation.
Another example, I’m not familiar if there are prejudices against kinky subs prevalent among the majority of vanilla gay men – sort of like the flak kinky gay women (dom and sub) get from some prejudiced non-kinky gay women.
Hiya! I just wanted to drop in and say that I just discovered your blog through Bitchy Jones’ Diary and that I love it! I thought your first post on here was particularly sweet, too; it’s great that Beej helped open your eyes so.
Anyway, I’ll be making sure to check back again in the future. Please keep up the good work.
Hey Ranai. That series looks great, I’ll have to check it out. I’m totally with you on the M/m stories, too. In fact, I think this is one of the reasons slash in general works for so many of us – no distracting godawful portrayals of women, no icky gender roles.
Hey Jayunderscorezero. Welcome, and thanks! I’m glad you approve. I’ll try to keep it up (work permitting, which has been a bit busy of late).