Thinking Kink: Playing With Race in BDSM

As with the issue of female sexual submission, racial imagery in a BDSM context is an issue apt to cause heated debates, so I want to include two sides of the argument. Today, I'll examine the objections to the use of racialized imagery in kink, and in my next post I'll look at the responses by those who defend it.

Tired of being reduced to stereotypes of "sassy" best friends, asexual "mammies" or hypersexual "hoes," black feminists have long defended black women's right to be counted as both sexy and sexual, without being accused of racial disloyalty. But when we add domination, whips, and chains to the mix, things get more complicated. Hardly suprising, given that much of the language surrounding BDSM involves those loaded words "master" and "slave." We might just be able to stomach the sight of Rihanna writhing around for Adam Levine's pleasure in the video to Maroon 5's "If I Never See Your Face Again," but when Levine grabs Rihanna by the hair and jerks her head back at the end of the clip, we're reminded that, for many of us, there's nothing sexy about a white man physically abusing a black woman.

Recently released novel Wench  by Dolen Perkins Valdez depicts the pre-Civil War abuses of black female slaves who were raped, beaten, and sexually enslaved by their masters. Even the novel's gentler male characters whose slaves sleep with them "consensually" make the readers' skin crawl. How anyone could indulge in behaviors that don't just glorify but actively eroticize this oppression is baffling to some. When Snoop Dogg/Lion appeared with two black women on leashes at the 2003 MTV awards, condemnations mostly focused on the way the women were being treated as objects and subordinated to a man. The connection with slavery and racism didn't really surface until Justin Timberlake was seen yanking Ciara around on a chain and using her as human furniture in the video for "Love Sex Magic" in 2010. Commenters felt that sexualizing such an ugly echo of slavery was obscene: "our ancestors are crying inside."

While many kinksters would immediately respond with the defense that BDSM is about playing with the forbidden and taboo, and pushing boundaries, this is insufficient even for some black people within the scene. Chupoo, a black submissive, says, "I can't do race play because I have people in my family who had to submit to that, where they had no choices. It's too close to home for American black people." She adds that, while she can accept the transgressive appeal of erotic language that seems to degrade women, she cannot accept scenarios that do the same to black people: "The race thing is really a lot deeper."

The language of choice used to defend race play does ring hollow when we consider that the BDSM scene itself is not immune to dubious racial politics. Researcher Margot Weiss found that the Bay Area BDSM community was overwhelmingly white, but its participants considered themselves anti-racist, feeling that "their play [was] divorced from and irrelevant to racial inequality." Weiss wonders if this neo-liberal "colorblindness" actually just salves white people's consciences with "the fantasy of an escape from racism without giving up the material benefits of whiteness."

For Weiss, it's important to go beyond freedom of choice arguments. Is the First Amendment really sufficient excuse to eroticize the terms "master" and "slave," and even engage in scenes such as "slave auctions"? For some, absolutely not. "Jonathon," a commenter on Racialicious, says if you want to engage in race play, "that's your business. But when you take that imagery out of the BDSM club and broadcast it all over the world, you are exposing people to something that they may find highly objectionable. It shows NO RESPECT to those who have suffered."

Perhaps this goes to the heart of the matter: Private play is one thing, but putting eroticized sexual and racial violence out there in pop culture is quite another. As commenters on my previous post noted, rough sex can be great in the bedroom, but inevitably grows misogynistic on TV or in porn. If BDSM practitioners are obliged to be sensitive to their audience at a play party (one of Margot Weiss' interviewees muses that he might indulge in race play in private, "but in public, no fucking way"), should our media be held more accountable for glorifying images of white men being sexually aggressive to black women? How much responsibility should we demand of artists like Rihanna and Ciara—if any—to be cautious of such imagery? Responses to these questions, and some very different views on the matter, coming next post...

Previously: Gay S&M in Pop Music, Then and Now, The Politics of BDSM Fashion