Male Submission Art

A very old man closes his eyes as a tag and padlock are affixed to a wavy metal collar encircling his neck.

Today, I turned 27, and I am afraid. When I look to the future, I feel capable of seeing only the single stereotype of older submissive men that exists: alone, disgusting, and desperate. I like this picture because it offers an escape, however fleeting, from that catastrophizing.

Today, I turned 27, and I am angry. Everywhere I look in public, there are different discussions happening than everywhere I look in private. When I try to articulate this difference, it rarely receives public acknowledgement. So I lash out in barely-restrained anger at people I ought not. These comments are another good illustration:

Before I ever wore a collar, I read about other submissives being collared on blogs, and I thought it sounded nice, but in a ritualistic way that seemed a little hokey to me.  Still, it seemed meaningful for them.

I like to imagine the man in this picture has been a submissive all his life, but only now he’s been able to act on that and find a dominant lover.  And here he is, being collared at last, when he’s 84.  That seems very romantic….

Think, for a moment, how 84 years of unrequited submissive desire might feel. Only in as sick a world as ours could this be called “romantic.” It should be called epistemic abuse.

Today, I turned 27, and I am diffident. Ironically, my reputation as the author of this website could be turned into more opportunities to play and fuck the way I want than I ever imagined. But in that reality I can no longer honestly count myself among the men for whom I want my writings to speak.

Please understand that I feel as though I was the creepy old guy before he was either creepy or old. I was hurting because the community where I felt most at home was the same one that made me feel the most unattractive.

So as my youth—that other stereotype of sexual desirability—inevitably slips further away, I grow more afraid. And the more I’m told to “count my blessings,” the angrier I get, not because I’ve got nothing going for me, but because I cannot abide a world in which some of us are so love- and touch-starved that getting something back from sharing really personal fears with the Internet is considered a “blessing” in the first place.

I think we can do better. What’s stopping us?

-maymay

A man bound with his arms above his head bites his lip as a woman wearing a sunhat gropes him and smiles.

Shortly after I saw this contribution to Submissive Secrets, I reblogged it on my personal Tumblr to ask for more images featuring both male submission and body-positivity. Almost immediately after that, ireensarrows suggested this photograph. Then, after using that “secret” to announce Submissive Secrets on Male Submission Art, mswyrr independently suggested the exact same photograph.

I could not have been more pleased. Not only is this picture a gorgeous contribution in its own right—look at her smile, his responsiveness, the bondage!—the models are none other than my friends Kitty Stryker, a self-identified fat girl, and her partner (whose self-identification I am unaware of but who is certainly larger in size than I am); I recognized them immediately. Moreover, the image is sourced from the Filament Magazine blog, whose author, Suraya Singh, has been a repeat guest on the netcast I produce, Kink On Tap.

In one hand, the fact that there seems to be such a small group of Good People doing this Good Work is disquieting. In the other, I’m reminded how despite the fact that only 2% of Americans were actively involved in the civil rights movement, they had an enormous impact. (And while I cannot verify that statistic, I also don’t wish to see it debunked because it gives me hope.)

mswyrr had this to say:

In response to the secret you posted: submissive boys with body fat are fucking gorgeous, too. Sweet and touchable. I could cuddle up to a boy and stroke his soft tummy in quiet bliss for hours. There are no words!

I like skinny boys, too. But, among the minority of images portraying male submission, it is a sad fact that thin men and buff men are most widely represented. I’m submitting this image because it’s one of the few I’ve found of a big, beautiful fellow. Guh.

As I’ve said before, the sheer number of duplicate suggestions this blog gets evinces the paltry availability of quality erotic images featuring marginalized groups. Even the way “male submission” is often (mis)understood as “femdom” reveals a fractal pattern of categorical privilege flipped upside-down when it comes to sexuality. Though not always welcome attention, fat women are sometimes fetishized, while fat men are overwhelmingly portrayed as purely repulsive.

Kitty has written about the “rather weighty issue” of her size:

[I]f I’m just having a self-concious sort of day, I get a bit nervous stripping down. I make sure my panties are smoothed over my belly in a way that disguises the way it curves to my pubic hair. […] I wouldn’t say I don’t like [my body]—I do, we go through a lot together, it and I, and I have few complaints—I think I feel uncertain of it, more, unsure that it’s up to par.

Although written by a woman, these are sentiments I imagine many fat men can relate to. As with most issues regarding self-esteem, the discussion is dominated by women’s insecurities, leaving men trapped in the Man Box. As a result, fat men frequently face similar sexual erasure as other “other”-ed groups. Sadly, they have few places, if any, to experience being desired—as they are.

-maymay

A “secret” shared via Submissive Secrets, a community art project based on the PostSecret concept and inspired by several contributions to the Queer Secrets Tumblr regarding BDSM. The secret is:

[ Image: the Male Submission Art tumblr, with title changed to Male Submission Art With Over 15% Body Fat. The search box says “men who look like me” and the content column is blank. Text: I must have heard it over 100 times: “I like curvy women but skinny guys.” I know most guys aren’t supposed to be anxious about their bodies. But I wouldn’t be here in the first place if I was most guys. ]

I’m posting this here because, after years of sharing pieces of my story with you, I’d like to invite you to share a piece of your story with me.

As you may know, Male Submission Art was a website created in a fit of frustration. At its root, this website is a response to (epistemically abusive) pain. Specifically, it’s a response to the pain inflicted by the sometimes inescapable presumption of male dominance.

I maintain that although this pain is not a universal experience, it is an underreported, under-appreciated, and above all underrepresented manifestation of the abuse culture in which we live. Abuse culture spawns rape culture. But abuse culture also spawns transphobia. It spawns psychopathic “blinding macho” socialization. And, as this secret makes so beautifully clear, it spawns body-negativity.

I, for one, am sick and tired of being sick and tired—I am tired of feeling alone. And so, in a fit of frustration, like Male Submission Art before it, I recently made a spinoff website called Submissive Secrets as a response to this pain.

In his blog, Roger Ebert described the effect of loneliness like this:

When I was a child the mailman came once a day. Now the mail arrives every moment. I used to believe it was preposterous that people could fall in love online. Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude.

My experience blogging at Male Submission Art has been a remarkable education in the way one might use a keyboard to cry out from one’s solitude. It embodies, in cyberspace, my own desperate attempt to transform things that harm me into things that help me. But this website is largely still about me and so, at times, I have felt regret that my own pain sometimes prevented me from updating this site on a more regular basis because I know how much it has helped others.

Now that I know I’m not alone, this website is no longer enough. As I wrote on the Submissive Secrets about page:

I believe it is time to tell the stories and share the thoughts, feelings, desires, and fears submissive men and those who love them have in a way that offers solidarity, compassion, empathy, trust, sympathy, lust, and, of course, love.

[…]

Since storytelling is the foundation of any movement, I want to collect the stories of any male, male-identified, or masculine-of-center person who’s submissively inclined or curious. And I also want to collect the stories of everyone else who is attracted to, interested in, or supportive of such drives for personal fulfillment. And then, once we have all shared our stories about these experiences, we will have made the world a better place for it, and, together, we are going to show everyone that it is good to be the kind of people we are.

It’s true we are not all identical; we have a variety of different tastes. But we are all human. And we all deserve to be happy. So if we can’t just snap our fingers and make everyone happy, the least we can do is make ourselves heard.

[…]

My hope is that with everyone sharing pieces of their story, we will weave a beautiful patchwork tapestry.

And so, from my mind to yours, I invite you: be heard.

-maymay

An opulently dressed man in Greek-inspired clothing and greaves leans backwards onto a ledge as a similarly-dressed woman holds him by the waist and grips his hair.

Here’s a complex picture whose layered meanings become more complex as one learns its context. Suggested independently by both Science Me Harder and Svollga, the image is a photograph from a 1932 stage production of The Warrior’s Husband (one year before it became a Hollywood screenplay) showing Katharine Hepburn in the role of Antiope, an Amazon royal, and Colin Keith-Johnston in the role of Theseus, leader of the Greek army. It’s a gorgeous picture for all the reasons Science Me Harder enumerates:

[T]his picture always strikes me as beautiful because of the way the woman holds the man’s hair and supports him with her other arm, and especially the way the man seems to be standing so still and willing to be held with his eyes closed.

Svollga shared similar sentiments:

I was very attracted to this image, both because it’s beautiful (the lines! the poses! the dynamics!) and because to me, it speaks clearly of power exchange and female domination. The historical context only adds more layers to the feeling. (Not to mention that it hits a lot of my kinks, from gender role-reversal to hair-gripping.)

It looks like a reversal of roles for the bodice-ripper cover. Usually, it’s a man holding a woman around a waist, leaning her back, even gripping her hair. Here, the woman (and a very feminine one) does it all to a (big and strong) man—and he seems to like it. They are both very sensual and relaxed in this picture. It looks like a foreplay where people are either well-acquainted or just very comfortable with each other, and they are actually playing while being quite serious about it.

While I share Svollga’s enthrallment with this picture, overt role-reversal was intentionally comedic in the 1930s. The “historical context” is quite different than what one might hope. According to the 1933 screenplay’s description, The Warrior’s Husband is not a tale of female domination, but rather voluntary female subordination:

The Warrior’s Husband is a satire of the male and female roles in society set in 800 B.C. starring Elissa Landi as Antiope, an Amazonian beauty and sister to the queen of Pontus. Queen Hippolyta (Marjorie Rambeau) rules Pontus with masculine authority; in fact, it is the women of Pontus who do all the laboring, fighting, and governing. Hippolyta’s husband Sapiens (Ernest Truex) is truly a sissy of the first order, and is not unlike most of Pontus’ male inhabitants. When the Greek army under Theseus (DM) invades in pursuit of the queen’s “magic girdle,” the appearance of real men on the scene is strange and unnerving to the women of Pontus. Struck by Antiope’s beauty Theseus woos her and, reluctantly at first, she falls in love with him. Realizing the value of male leadership, the Amazons willingly allow the men to assume control.

Lacking context, we can easily project our fantasies onto this image but when we factor in the story’s plot we see that gender roles were not actually reversed. Even before the story’s culmination in the patriarchy we’re familiar with, “masculine authority” was used to rule Pontus and its “sissy” male inhabitants were not “real men.” Reversing anatomy does not in fact reverse gender role because gender is not the same as sex; in Pontus, women functioned as men only so long as “real men” were not present, while men functioned as women until they were replaced by abusive psychopaths wielding weapons who suffer from what Kathleen Barry calls “blinding macho” socialization.

In this way, The Warrior’s Husband is a useful parable explaining the contemporary BDSM community’s shared delusion. Although the community’s sycophants like to tout their “diversity,” most organized elements of “The Scene” essentially recreate Pontus by equating performances of masculinity with domination and performances of femininity with submission. In The Scene, things are only cursorily more complex since dominance is privileged while submission is devalued regardless of one’s genitalia.

While there is certainly space for gender role-reversal within BDSM, by ignorantly supplanting the overculture’s (man/woman) gender binary with their own (dominant/submissive) power binary, BDSM’ers sabotage the possibility for creative expression within their scenes and undercut whatever credibility they wish to claim on the matter.

-maymay

oldhollywood:

Katharine Hepburn as Amazon warrior princess Antiope & Colin Keith-Johnston as Theseus in stage production of The Warrior’s Husband (1932) (via corbis)

Lightly blindfolded and holding the handle of a flogger in hir mouth, a trans-male bottom is beaten by an enthusiastic top.

This photograph is part of a set in an album called Kinky Tea Party, although it arrived with a note titled “Reverse-tea scene,” which is perhaps a more accurate name. The set has numerous fantastic images, and I couldn’t easily decide which to feature here. Ultimately, I felt drawn to the emotional and physical exposure in this one; both models are emotive and, despite the violent symbolism inherent in the sadomasochistic act, neither model embodies violence.

That said, I’d be remiss not to point you at the other photographs in the set I think are particularly beautiful, especially because they reveal a wider, even more fascinating context to the photo shoot, which Sadie, who contributed this image, explained:

I am Sadie, the grinning trans-womyn in the photos. My partner, the GQ [genderqueer] trans-male identified play-thing in the photos is Tanner Fierce. The femme GQ photographer is my dear friend Milo Ampersand.

The premise for this shoot was that there is an intentional and awkward disconnect between polite society and the sexual reality of all human interactions. Milo arranged a half-dozen of hir friends to have a well-dressed tea-party. Tanner and I had a flogging scene in their midst, and the party-goers were dis-allowed from looking at or acknowledging our presence in any way, as they sipped tea and spoke in faux British accents of the weather and local politics.

What was especially exciting about this scene was the tension between Tanner’s physical submission, and the party-goers psychological submission. In particular, the man in the grey suit (who is one of Tanner’s best friends) was exquisitely torn between the instruction to abstain from looking, and the irresistible desire to engage with the sexual reality of the space. This tension, and the power of dominating without any direct interaction was the primary appeal of the scene. The result was what I have come to think of as a reverse-tea scene, where everyone serves themselves tea, for one-domme’s pleasure.

That. Is. Awesome.

-maymay

A young man, gagged with ribbon, clutches at the white sheets he’s resting on.

This image of a “submissive boy with a rosary” was suggested by Emily Marigold. I like it in part for the obvious talent in the drawing, the signs of anguish, evinced by lacerations on the man’s shoulder and the smudged eyeliner, and the fact that he’s wearing eyeliner in the first place. And, yes, I also like seeing the broken rosary, since it offers a narrative hook to imagine him as someone religiously persecuted—a martyr.

Martyrdom is a common narrative among BDSM players; “I’ll take it for you.” Certainly sexy, but many utilize the script to abdicate personal agency; rarely do these bottoms remember the more important words: “I want to take it for you.” As Dr. Staci Newmahr writes, “Martyrdom bottoming does not rely on the ultimate denial of pleasure, but in adherence to a martyr script.”

It’s unfair to levy blame on the bottoms who display such unthinking loyalty to this cultural script, though, especially the men. Other than martyrdom, common characterizations of men bottoming rely on archetypal feminization, whether implicitly (the meme of submissive men doing housework is a particularly sexist example) or explicitly (“sissified sissy maids who insist on talking about their sissy clitty”). These are obviously problematic formulations for any masculine-of-center individuals, not just men.

This may explain why I’ve seen what’s become a predictable uptick in suggestions to this site featuring Saint Sebastian, perhaps the most famous Christian martyr save Jesus himself. It’s not the abundance of the martyrdom script I find frustrating, but rather its omnipresence. This ubiquity has real (and, to me, troubling) consequences; as Dr. Newmahr points out, “A self-identified male top who sometimes bottoms, for example, is more likely to claim identity as a top than as a switch. A woman with the same inclinations is likelier…to consider herself a switch.” (See Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy, p. 109, ¶2.)

In other words, this goes some distance towards explaining that “the number problem“—the assertion that there are simply not as many dominant women as there are dominant men—is an unfortunate cultural construction.

-maymay

Attribution update: This piece is called Imprisoned and was created by feimo, originally published on DeviantArt.

Facing away from the camera while on all fours, a bald, naked man presents his ass to be caned by a woman smiling into the camera. She wears a T-shirt, jeans, and multi-colored socks.

This photo was brought to my attention by Molly Ren, who simply wrote, “This photo sums up everything that Male Submission Art is about.” Well, perhaps at first. What Male Submission Art is about these days, however, is less the images and much more the wonderful responses to them. Thankfully, here, too, this image provides a fantastic showcase. To wit, here’s one thread of commentary this picture has received online:

iheartsmut:

I love it too!  I have my domme moments, so far just in my head, but I think, geez, I need a new wardrobe before I can try any of this.  Maybe not.  Love her impish look, too—another encouraging sign, because I know I don’t have a bitch goddess in me.

continuousstateofdesire:

I adore this pic.  She is cute, she is smiling, and she holds a cane.  I wish there were more D/s images where the Domme is not dressed in stereotypical atire (not that there’s anything wrong with that once in a while).  This pic gives me hope that the cute, unassuming, woman at work or at the cafe is in reality a pervy Domme who might want me to crawl around for her. 

ireensarrows:

dishevelleddomina:

Awwwa, look at the cute redheaded domme in comfy clothes preparing to cane her yummy bald fucktoy…

sigh of contentment.

This picture makes me so many kinds of happy. It reminds me of the one time a sub told me that I cannot possibly go about dominatrixing in my cute striped socks. Why yes, sweetheart, I think I can. (Not him, though. He got dumped.)

The BDSM community ghetto, which I argue has been a largely self-imposed social stricture of internalized exclusion, does seem to be betraying its frailty. I am at once unspeakably proud and enormously humbled to recognize whatever small part I’ve had in tearing down these walls.

-maymay

A man rests naked in a fetal position, one foot cozily curled around the other, laying on the legs of his partner.

This is an adorable image, provided by T-anon, who had the following explanation for it:

This is a photo I took of my partner just after a rather fun bout of BDSM. Once I had untied him from the bedpost he curled into my thigh, shuddering and moaning that he loved me. I just about exploded with the rush of adoration. He was so beautiful in that position with the ruddy marks from my nails across his back, the blindfold and the medical restraints still tied to him. I simply had to take a photo.

It has since become a mutual favourite, commemorating our love and our trust. We thought it was worth putting on this site as a way of supporting safe and healthy sex along with the beauty that is submissive men.

Ordinarily, I try to have something especially witty or insightful to say when I post here. In this case, however, I feel adding too much of my own would merely be a shadow to the literal and emotional light emanating from this photograph.

I am sincerely thankful to T-anon and their partner for sharing a moment of such evident love with me, and I am sincerely grateful to have the privilege of sharing it more widely with others in the world we all share.

-maymay

This image was submitted by Jason C. Woodson, who’s also its creator. The artwork is part of a series called Bound (You Felons On Trial). I’ll leave analysis of the image itself in Jason’s words alone:

Bound (You Felons On Trial) was created in response to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, a bill introduced [in Britain] to ban extreme forms of pornography. In an article published on the Index for Censorship website, lawyer John Lovatt advised that There are many books it would be safer to mutilate—or destroy altogether.

The idea of consenting adults burning books in their backyards to avoid an intrusive State was alarming to me. As a gay artist whose work is often sexual in nature and could be seen by some as of an obscene character as described under Section 63 of the Act, I was reminded of a poem by Walt Whitman. Entitled You Felons on Trial, it asks, Who am I too that I am not on trial or in prison?

Many classes of people, such as the BDSM community, will be affected by this legislation. That’s why I chose to photograph a male nude in a BDSM act. The images are defaced but hidden inside them run lines from Whitman’s work, ending with the last line of the poem: And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?

I’ve discussed §63 before. At best misguided and at worst malicious, the law criminalizes possession of sexual depictions the State finds objectionable. It is not hyperbole to explain that under this legislation, you are subject to pain of criminal prosecution even if someone else sends you the objectionable material.

Laws like this, frequently lobbied for by pro-censorship groups euphemistically calling themselves anti-pornography feminists (or, more frighteningly, anti-trafficking), are a clear and present danger to the citizenry—to you. They represent a (barely) pseudo-fascist moralism borne of the same virulent disease as rampant nationalism or religious doctrine, and corrupt the humanity of government with a two-faced appeal to an individual’s most humane ability: empathy. A form of security theater, it takes advantage of a demanding and ignorant public by using the lowest common denominator of reason and behavior to craft law and policy—but the lowest common denominator does not make for sound law.

Sexuality is a frequent scapegoat in attempts to justify power-grabbing laws, and you need to be concerned about that regardless of your sexuality or place of residence. Australia has recently seen the creation of a literal secret government Internet blacklist whose scope, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, “had been rapidly expanded from child porn to other material including political discussions.” Since it’s all on one list, I guess the Australian government considers child pornography and political discussion to be the same thing.

Americans enjoy precious First Amendment protection, but the anti-porn pseudo-fascist moralists are batting for the same pro-censorship team as the RIAA, who have recently introduced the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). A copy-cat law, COICA would mandate government-decreed Internet censorship of any site found to be infringing record and movie industry copyrights. Since copyright infringement is a relatively unpopular cause, mark my words: child porn will be a future excuse.

-maymay