This cover of Vogue is getting a lot of attention. Women's advocacy groups around the world, including the National Organization for Women in the U.S., are arguing that the cover photo sexualizes and glamorizes domestic violence and rape.Huh? I just don't see it.
Okay, I don't get why the guy is apparently sucking on his own finger, but that is beside the point.
What I see is a very hot depiction of consensual sexual domination.
Let me be clear. I am not an advocate of domestic violence or rape in any way. I can say from first hand experience that there is nothing sexy about rape and there is nothing erotic about domestic violence.
That's not what this photo is showing. It's obvious because there is no sense of fear in this photo. No look of fear on her face, no panic in her eyes.
Just as some of those women's groups are upset at what they perceive as the sexualization of domestic violence, I am deeply offended by their efforts to pervert sexual domination and submission into something violent and dirty. It's not. They fact that they can't see that this photo is obviously not about violence is also disturbing.
I'm not being facetious when I say that I suspect they have been so sheltered, sexually speaking, that they cannot even understand what a full, passionate, exciting, varied, and invigorating sex life can be. To them, anything that's not plain vanilla is evil and an affront to women. They are so uneducated, deprived or intolerant that even french vanilla (which is all this photo is, really) is scary for them.
What's next? Are we getting to the point where if a man even touches a woman somewhere other than her hand without her screaming, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" that it will be considered a sexual assault? Needless to say, I think it's going too far.
The women's movement is all about allowing women to have choices. That also means that women should have the right to choose to be sexually dominated by a man without the implication that she must have a psychological issue deeply rooted in a troubled childhood. And it means that the man she chooses to engage with sexually in that regard is not a rapist. Oh yeah, and he's not a psycho for liking it, either.
Unfortunately for the prudes of the world, they can no longer say that women (and men) who enjoy BDSM to any degree are a kinky fringe minority with a sick sense of sexuality. Fifty Shades of Grey debunked that myth. Millions of people are either into it or turned on by it and want to try it. Millions of people don't see it as rape or domestic violence. Because it's not.
The range of "perfectly normal" in human sexuality is broad. We're just learning that some of what we used to think was really kinky and unusual is actually much more common and, yes, normal.
I'm not a pervert for wishing I were the woman in that photo (but I'd pick a different guy) or for loving a good, hard, hair-pulling, ass-slapping, gagged fuck. The people who try to make me and millions of others feel dirty for liking it - they are the perverts.
Your thoughts?
