DemonKia
Posts: 5521
Joined: 10/13/2007 From: Chico, Nor-Cali Status: offline
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FR, after continuing read thru I like Merc's point, above, about the 'touching differential' . . . . . I'd like all this stuff to be egalitarian, but even adjusting for my own sexist stuff still leaves a skewed picture, so I think there are differences . . . . I was thinking about this after reading LP's reply to my response. Mother & Father archetypes . . . . . Particularly, I think, when it comes to dominant persons in a BDSM setting. The first & most significant authority figure in pretty much most people's lives is gonna be mommy & daddy (or the lack thereof, an equally profound shaper) . . . . & Mommy is the font of nurturance, the source of unconditional love that is supposed to be soft, loving, caring, gentle, kind -- all those femme characteristics rolled up into the 'Mama' thing, too. Dad, he's a different archetype, he's 'unconditional tough love'. Yeah, he might love his offspring for ever, but he'll also be the one dishing out the discipline / correction / punishment, the one who's prepared to walk away forever, if that's what it takes . . . . . (& keeping in mind I'm talking role expectations way more than I am individual data points . . . . . .) Hell, there's this whole phase many children go thru where they're generally timid-to-frightened around grown men (especially the strangers) but much more trusting of women . . . . . So, in general vanilla life, women are seen as 'more approachable' & men less so, & it has little to do with actual individuals & lots to do with human propensities to use pattern recognition to feel safe . . . . . There are lots of factors that feed into being approachable, 'friendly' versus 'aloof' kinds of stuff, some of which tend to align with femme versus masculine distributions of characteristics, too . . . . . As for the 'authority' thing, ie, the being-taken-seriously-&-with-respect-for-mastery-of-knowledge-skills-etc, there is a trend the other way from the approachability. Guys get accorded an 'authorative premium', & chicks get a discount, automatically, based on gender -- big generalization, of course. There've been studies that have shown this trend, also, fwtw. I'm familiar with this issue from the 'vanilla universe' & so I'm unsurprised to hear about it in the BDSM world. & given that there are factions of both male & female supremacists of various stripes vocal within the 'community', I'm betting there's a rainbow coalition of conflict over all kinds of nuances of sex & gender politics . .. . To cover my ass, I do feel moved to point out that it is social skills & personality factors that are the more significant determiners of 'approachability', far more so than gender or sex. Things that are learnable, changeable about self to a degree that sex & gender are not . ... .
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