A Cat May Look: Fealty and Slavery

Three threads to this braid: respect for support roles, individualism vs. collectivism, power and vulnerability. It starts at the beginning of all the threads, but trying to write that will start putting letters on top of each other and be wickedly hard to read. And I'm not gonna try to be clever and format it into columns or shit like that.

First mentioned thread: there's this fascinating thread of contempt for people who willingly take support roles. That nobody would hire on as the night janitor if they didn't have to. That nobody would settle for being the secretary if they could be the power executive. When it goes into caretaking it gets worse -- the idea that a full-time parent is actually working doesn't cross the mind of many, the people who take care of their elderly or ailing relatives are treated as having a time-consuming hobby.

A better person, a more competent, more capable person, that person would be in charge -- would have ambition, drive to succeed, would want to be the name on the letterhead, not the initials in lowercase in the bottom corner. Clearly, the one doing the typing, mopping the floor, changing the diaper, they're not suited to anything better. Anything worthy of respect.

Second thread: there's this creepy hivemind thing that I see a lot in the name of individualism. I mean, one can hearken back to the whole being a special unique snowflake just like everyone else when being flip, but there are Rules out there. Be a strong individual and follow your dream -- so long as your dream isn't to be anything that threatens the Rules. Maybe you get to pick your Rules a little and only take flak from people using different ones, but the Rules are still there. Shouldn't work, shouldn't work in these fields, shouldn't work for less than this amount of money, shouldn't think that way, shouldn't dress that way, why? Because we're more mature than that now. We know better. This is the right way. We don't want to be mistaken for Them.

Being an individual is all well and good, so long as one knows which ideology one's an individual in. Then there are the neat boxes that can be dragged out, some of them marked 'good' and some of them marked 'evil', and everything is neatly filed away, and nobody has to think about who anyone is.

Third thread: In the presence of a power differential, the people on the low end of things are living exposed and somewhat vulnerable. The power exists to affect them, and they have less to retaliate with. Holding that power is a drug, and like any drug, there is responsible use and irresponsible use. The position of power is a position to compel intimacy, to know and control more about someone else's life; even if one is not using that power, the possibility does exist for it to be used. And if the power does not exist in a framework of agreement and sufficient support for intimacy, people are gonna get hurt. And do get hurt, all the time.

Let's knot those three together with: I am kinked submissive.

And starting to braid:

Take the tension between personal loyalties and corporate ones at the middle-class level. I'm half-watching a discussion of women with professional jobs elsewhere (in this case, pharmacists), where people are complaining that women leave the field to have children. The argument was raised that these women should be more grateful for their education, and if they're not, well, maybe we shouldn't let 'em learn to be pharmacists. At the same time, men with families are expected to let their wives do the heavy lifting on childhood; they're supposed to be there for the job, work the overtime, not take off early to make it to the kid's recital or anything like that. The choice to have personal loyalty, to put family over the collective identity of the Worker For The Company, is denigrated, no matter who makes it; because women are presumed to inevitably make that choice, the women are denigrated.

Or consider the thread of the treatment of power in certain schools of feminist thought, the division into "power-over" and other things, as if there is some different taste to good power that distinguishes it from bad power. And the notion of consensus decision-making is something that I find insufferably oppressive, because it feels like a bending of the individual will inexorably into the collective, something that demands surrender, demands exposure to the intimacy of the will of the group. The collective will is coercive in a way that individual authority is not: not merely because of the psychology of mobs but because of the undercurrents of accusations of obstructionism, being difficult, not being a team player, not working with the group. The plays of power are still there, but they are all hidden under the seemingly-innocuous will of the whole.

Claim your own power, some will say, go forth and be strong and capable -- and I want to say look, I was a damn fine secretary. I did my job, I caught up the back paperwork, and for the most part, at five o'clock, I put it all down and went back to the rest of my life. I didn't need the authority, and I didn't want it; I just wanted to do the work and have done with it. But that's a subservient position, a support job -- and I'm supposed to care, supposed to subscribe to an ideology that says that being smart enough to be "more than a secretary" is sufficient reason to invest in things I don't want to do, because I am owned by my obligation to my intelligence, my obligation to my sex, my obligation to J. Random Ranting Lunatic, to be what they want me to be instead of what I want me to be.

And I come around to being submissive again, and considering my relationship with the person who evokes that most strongly in me, and all the ideologies that want to say that this is a wrong relationship for me to have -- for whatever reason, that it is not a monogamous partnership, perhaps, or that it is perpetrating the oppression of women to take a collar, or that this sexuality is improper, or that that form of power is disgusting, and I look at it. I look at where I am exposed, where I am vulnerable, what intimacies I will be bound to.

And I choose to be the vassal of a man who cares when I am in pain over being the slave of an ideology that only sees me as a point scored against the opposition.

(Edited to add: Mistress Matisse: on the subject of writing her own damn narrative. Other side of the power flip. Read it earlier today, and just realised it was apropos.)