Feminist Views on BDSM: Sex Wars, Samois, and the Consent Fight

For adult readers who know bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism, feminism’s attitude to this scene is not one block. It runs from a warm embrace to a sharp rejection. The fight turns on how “power” and “consent” get defined. One side treats BDSM as a liberating expression of women’s sexual freedom. The other reads it as a copy of patriarchal violence. The history is why dungeon ethics, lesbian SM club rules, and academic fights about consent still shape how people actually play.

The 1970s split, and the 1980s in public

In the 1970s feminist talk started to split. Lesbian feminism dominated much of the early decade. By the end of it, the conversation had widened past lesbian identity to heterosexuality, pornography, sadomasochism, butch/femme roles, and sex work. Groups such as Lavender Menace and Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media argued that BDSM play contradicted feminist commitments to women’s equality. At the same time Samois, a San Francisco lesbian BDSM group, insisted feminists could do SM without hypocrisy.

In the 1980s the sex wars drew academic attention. In New York, the Lesbian Sex Mafia, founded by Dorothy Allison, pushed sex-positive feminism and the claim that women had the right to explore sexuality in whatever ways they chose. The 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality is usually treated as the academic opening of that fight, putting pornography, SM, and consent on one stage for scholars, activists, and journalists. In London, Ardill and O’Sullivan used conflict around the London Lesbian and Gay Centre as a case of the same fight playing out again.

The 1990s, then Deckha on the law

In the 1990s scholars tried to close the gap from inside a feminist frame. Hopkins (1994) answered feminist arguments against sadomasochistic acts one by one, and argued that the issues were less concrete than activists sometimes claimed. Teresa Hornsby (1995) asked whether “violence” should be treated as an exclusively masculine activity, and argued that feminism and BDSM need not contradict each other.

After 2000, technology and pop culture made BDSM more visible. Maneesha Deckha brought a postcolonial feminist angle and suggested treating BDSM as a cultural practice, as one way to ease the split between feminists and practitioners. She focused on legal regulation: should SM sit under sexuality law or under violence law? Her sharp question was whether regulating BDSM mainly as sex hands patriarchy more control over women’s sexual expression.

Lesbian BDSM as the awkward case

D/s or butch/femme power play between lesbians has been the awkward spot in feminist analysis. Critics worry it rebuilds patriarchal structure. Supporters such as Hornsby argue that lesbians have already placed themselves outside heterosexual power systems, so they need not recreate patriarchy. Writing on feminist responses to S/M, and on Canadian legal regulation through Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, Deckha admitted that including lesbian BDSM made her theory too convoluted. Folding lesbian identity into a generic “woman” category is the erasure Calhoun discusses in “The Gender Closet: Lesbian disappearance under the sign ‘woman’.” The argument itself did not settle. One side says lesbian SM is still trapped inside patriarchal structure, so real consent is blocked. The other says that if two women, with no man in the room, negotiate pain and protocol, patriarchy as a structure is not necessarily “in the room.”

Thorn, Wakeman, and the safeword line

Practitioners who call themselves feminists answered the theory with their own scenes. Clarisse Thorn’s 2012 book The S&M Feminist works through that intersection. In a 2010 interview Jessica Wakeman described enjoying spanking and being dominated while identifying as an active feminist. She stressed that real BDSM is negotiated, and that either partner can stop it with a safeword, a phrase, or an action — unlike an abusive relationship, which lacks that consent. She insisted on a difference between bedroom theater and daily life, and she rejected the claim that women are simply trained into submission by sexist power structures. A separate slogan inside many BDSM communities says submissives hold the final control because they can end the scene. That line is meant to answer readings that cast female submissives as helpless victims.

The two poles, still in the dungeon

On one pole, Patrick Califia and Gayle Rubin stand for the sex-positive line. Rubin’s 1984 essay “Thinking Sex” is widely treated as a founding text of sexuality studies and queer theory. Samois, which she founded with Califia and others, became a major force in the feminist sex wars of the late 1970s and the 1980s. On the other pole, Andrea Dworkin and Susan Griffin framed BDSM as misogynist violence and treated the eroticizing of dominance as a replay of women’s oppression.

Academic heat has cooled. The sex-wars vocabulary still shapes dungeon culture. House rules that ban certain edge play, and arguments over whether professional domination is “feminist labor” or “commodified misogyny,” recycle 1970s and 1980s scripts. Munches and university BDSM clubs often teach SSC/RACK alongside a short history of Samois against anti-porn feminism, so newcomers learn why “can a feminist be a submissive?” is a loaded question. Media panics about Fifty Shades-style submission reboot the older claim that women cannot truly consent to eroticized inequality.

What a kink site can actually use

A careful account on a kink site does not need to declare a winner. Dworkin and Griffin name a real history of sexualized violence against women. Rubin and Califia name women building pleasure and community under stigma. The ethics that survive in scene practice are narrower than either manifesto. Consent has to be ongoing and informed. Economic and social coercion can fake consent. Aftercare and drop — sub drop — are real in the body and the head. Female submission is common and still not mandatory. Female dominance is not a betrayal of sisterhood. Humiliation play about gender is not public policy about gender.

Feminist views on BDSM will keep disagreeing. Communities that want both safety and freedom have to keep turning those disagreements into house rules, contracts, and the plain right to say red — whether the person saying it is wearing the collar or holding the whip.