Female submission
Related: women - masochism - self injury
Non-fiction: here
Novels: Story of O (1954) - Pauline Réage - The Image (1956) - Gordon (1966) - Edith Templeton
Films: The Story of O (1975) - Romance X (1999) - Secretary (2002) - In the Cut (2003)
Contrast: female domination
Half Dressed, She Obeyed: Erotic Fiction (1993) - Deborah Ryder
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Definition
Female submission describes sadomasochism in which women are punished or dominated, usually by men but sometimes by other women. It is a popular female fantasy that appears in many books on Black Lace, an erotic publishing imprint written exclusively by women for a mainly female readership.
--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_submission [Apr 2005]
A myth to justify male dominance of women
Several authors (Caplan, 1985; Symonds, 1979) have suggested that female masochism (both sexual and social) is a myth perpetrated to justify and reinforce male dominance of women. -- Denise Donnelly, James Fraser in http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m2294/n5-6_v39/21227879/p1/article.jhtml?term=Masochism, Freud claimed, was "truly feminine."
ABSTRACT: Masochism, Freud claimed, was "truly feminine." In the 1970s, masochism was considered to be one of the problems that feminists had to conquer. In the 1990s, masochism has been heralded as an emancipatory sexual position for men. This essay considers some of the problems raised by recent theorizing of male masochism, which presumes that masochism, for or between "women," is a reproduction of patriarchal womanhood. I argue that the unarticulated ground for male masochism is the impossibility of masochistic sexuality between women. The essay contextualizes these questions within lesbian-produced representations of dildoes as "the real thing(s)," butch- femme roles, and sadomasochistic erotica. --LYNDA HART, http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.993/hart.993
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