After laying extensive groundwork in the first five parts of the series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), I’ve finally gotten to the reason I began writing The Prudes’ Progress in the first place, which is talking about ways and reasons to fall out of love with dominance, and even ways to begin lovingly disentangling ourselves from fetishes which have twisted deep into our hindbrain.

Sexuality is something we cultivate, and feminist desire is sexual permaculture – or Gyn/Ecology, to use Mary Daly’s definition: “In contrast to… fixation and dismemberment, Gyn/Ecology affirms that everything is connected.” We’ve already looked at the connections between ours and others’ Selves, and at dismantling some of the political processes which support instrumental sexuality; the next step is to stop practising instrumental sexuality in order to create a space for something else to grow. “Practice” can mean a thing we do, but “practise” can also mean a thing we repeat and rehearse in order to ingrain, as in “practise makes perfect”. Progressing involves falling out of practise with the love of dominance.

And later,

… the path out of fetishisation is about a lack of distance. This doesn’t mean enthusiastically embracing the fetish behaviour, but rather taking time to see it clearly without it being about sex. Meeting it somewhere outside of the bedroom for a cup of tea, so to speak. It’s not a coincidence that patriarchy warns us that, “men and women can’t be friends”; it’s worried that if they come to know each other as friends, the magic (the fetishistic charge) might go away. Thinking about distance should also warn us that shame, disgust and denial are all potentially ineffective ways to undo fetishes. All these reactions continue to hold the fetish at a distance, via, “I shouldn’t”, “I don’t want to” and “I don’t”. In fact, each of these three distancing methods is explicitly sexualised: chocolate advertisements sell their product as deliciously deviant; in every film where the female and male lead hate each other we know they’ll end up in bed; and “I don’t want to” is branded by this rape culture as enticement rather than the firm boundary it is.

In this piece I also explicitly address BDSM, and I’ve tried to approach it in a way which is hopefully compassionate to and recognisable to BDSM practitioners, without compromising a radical feminist analysis. I hope that anti-BDSM radical feminists and people with even very close loving ties to BDSM alike will be able to find the section useful: