How to Date a Feminist

As a feminist dating within straight relationships, I often feel I’m expected to live up to the fantasy of the dominatrix. The deviant. The casual shag who’ll take the reins because I’m liberated. And do you know what? I’m sick of this expectation.

“You’re into kinks? So you’re a feminist, right?”
– Tinder man, 2015.

Exhibit A: The well-meaning Tinder acquaintance, assuming that sexuality and ideologies are necessarily related, and that kinks and feminism are synonymous. I hate to say it but sometimes I just like to be fucked. Dominated, not dominant. Yet people seem to have a hard time entertaining the idea that a feminist might be into submissive, rough and hard fucking. And that can be really inconvenient. “What? I mean, like, yeah I’m down with that but you’re a feminist!” (another Tinder guy, 2015).

It seems that I’ve gotten myself into the position of being told – even by those who are very politically thoughtful – what my sexuality should be. To me, this subtly cries of hegemony. Hegemony which causes people (typically cis men), to project feminist fantasies onto liberated women. These fantasies create a restrictive expectation that feminists perform an identity which is no longer defined – or chosen – by themselves. I'm just going to be blunt and call this out as inverse patriarchy.

Feminists have continually tried to drive a stake through the heart of the essentialist beast that says women are a static category with a uniform set of needs. Yet for some reason this similar conception hasn’t translated to understanding 'the feminist' itself. Feminists don’t all think the same, don’t all act the same, don’t have uniform needs, expectations or aspirations. So why, when dating, do I continually feel like I’m being put into a restrictive ‘feminist’ box?

Why should feminism be used as a way to sneakily re-incarnate hegemonic ideas about dominant women? Sexual liberation in which women may attend to their own sexual appetites and desires is one of the most important gains for feminism. Yet this liberation, in my experience, is frequently used to homogenise expectations of strong women.

Why this has me furiously bashing the shiny letters of my keyboard is because women under these expectations often begin policing their own sexual choices. Wondering what type of sex they should enact in order to uphold the ideas of strength and power. Does first date sex make me a bad feminist? Does withholding first date sex make me a bad feminist? What will submissiveness say about my politics?

I will confess, all of these questions run through my head when dating. I feel like my choices are limited and expectations weigh heavy on me. Feminism declares that women can choose what they want to do with their bodies, yet the added epithet of the necessarily strong woman too often becomes an expectation that women play out a fantasy of domination.

So the take-home message for all you straight guys dating a feminist is the following; I’ll dominate yah honey, sure thing, but don’t presume I want to because of my politics.