Dear Ludic Liberators,
📧you’re receiving this letter because you either signed up for the Ludic Liberation Lab updates or have attended a Lab and hopefully want to keep in touch. If you don’t want to get any more of these emails, you can easily unsubscribe at the bottom of this message. OR, you can unsubscribe, wait a few seconds, and then re-subscribe, as a kind of torturous tease to play with me, yourself, and the universe. do you actually know what you want, even when it comes to emails? 📧
⚠️ This email contains multiple instances of the word “Fuck” which might be considered offensive or inappropriate especially in business professional or child-centered spaces, so if you’re in the habit of reading all of your emails out loud inside a pre-school or projecting your email on a large screen for all your co-workers to see, you might want to reconsider doing so with this particular email. On the other hand, you might not! Fuck everything! ⚠
Last night at the Ludic Liberation Lab, we played with Failing at Gender. I found it to be one of the most liberating labs in the 13-month history of the project, which is impressive and edifying, because the primary goal of LLL is to create liberating experiences/experiments, and all of our sessions try to do that in some way. As I lay in bed last night, wondering what made this lab so liberating (for me personally, it could have felt the opposite for someone else!), I decided that a big part of it was the initial set up. At the top of the session, our Principal Investigator (PI), who last night went just by “In” said “Gender is really fucked up, so these games are fucked up, and you might not want to do any of this and decide organize a mutiny against me.” Then we proceeded to play with something nauseatingly, awfully uncomfortable, which was assigning and competing with one another for the titles of most “Manly,” “Womanly” and “Something Else.” AHH! So fucked up! So uncomfortable! So offensive!
AND YET—we were warned. We knew what we were getting into. An awful, stereotyped, problematic categorization scheme that for the most part makes our relationship to ourselves and one another yuckier, more restrictive, and abusive. No game was going to “sweeten” or “fix” it. We were here to playfully poke at this gross, ugly, oozing, and painful mess. Masochistically. Sadistically. Consensually.
Hmm… Mmm… I’d like to make a somewhat provocative proposition:
Gender is a form of BDSM.
???? Let’s define the seemingly more controversial construct first. BDSM is an umbrella term for a collection of relational dynamics involving the interplay of Bondage & Discipline (B&D), Domination & submission (D/s), and Sadism & Masochism (S&M).
BDSM is commonly considered to be culturally taboo because it’s associated with SEX (ooh la la) and the (admittedly not uncomplicated) practice of intentionally inflicting pain on others. But for our purposes, we are primarily interested in BDSM as a set of dynamics that explicitly explore power inequality as a playground, rather than something fixed, natural, essential, or determined.
Let’s see if we can mount a mathematical proof of GENDER = f(BDSM). To do this, we will have to demonstrate the ways gender corresponds to each of the 6 sub-terms of the BDSM acronym….
Gender involves bondage. Bondage is the practice is physical restraint. Trying to win at gender, by which I mean trying to conform to a binary gender as precisely as possible (either the gender one was assigned at birth OR the opposite one), often involves intense physical restraints. Whether it’s wearing a bra, “discreet bodysuit shapers” like Spanx (what a BDSMy name!), or a chest-binder, conforming to gender involves elaborate bondage of…. Fat. It’s usually Fat! It’s always fat? Fat is gender’s “rope bunny,” constantly being tied up and suffocated. Maybe it likes it?
Gender involves discipline. Discipline refers to the dynamic of setting and obeying behavioral rules, and doling out or receiving punishments when the expected behaviors are violated. All of society industriously collaborates to remind one another of gender’s strict rules, using memetic technologies like proverbs, magazines, television shows, labels, and everyday talk. There are just two sets of the rules, and some of the rules may internally contradict another, but that’s just what makes “winning” so much more impressive, so much more desirable! Boys don’t feel. Girls must cook. Men are strong. Women are nurturing. Punishments for deviation are both socially and self-administered, frequently verbal and psychological, though sometimes also involve inflicting physical pain.
Gender is dominant. Domination is the practice of taking control of another being. Guess who is the top in THIS relationship? Yup, it’s GENDER!!!!! Gender demands that its requirements be prioritized over our personal desires. Or else, it wants to convince us that its requirements ARE our personal desires. Hmm, maybe it’s right. Is our deepest desire actually to submit?
Gender makes us submit. Submission is the practice of relinquishing personal control. When we submit ourselves fully to gender, we sometimes enter the trance-like endorphin high known as subspace which feels like a sacred container in which only the sub (you) and the top (Gender) exist. Have you had that moment of looking at yourself in the mirror or looking at your own body or looking at yourself through the flipped camera of your cell-phone and feeling…. the pleased lover’s gaze? That feeling of gender casting its approval on your… strained or spontaneous…. but always temporary, always uncertain… performance? Perhaps every selfie is an act of submission, a show of a bottom’s devotion.
Gender is sadistic. Sadism is the experience of pleasure or enjoyment at causing another person’s pain, humiliation, or suffering. Isn’t Gender the sadist behind majority of all elective plastic surgery, the literal cutting up of a body, with a fucking knife? Gender relishes in the blood and the bruises it causes. When it can’t consensually generate those, it relishes in our humiliation of being not enough, of our body’s deviant displays, our desperate efforts to hide our incoherences through costume and make-up.
Gender makes us masochistic. Masochism is the enjoyment of experiencing pain, humiliation, or suffering – within a specific consensual, sadomasochistic scenario. (Important: masochists do not enjoy pain and suffering all the time in all contexts!) Gender conditions us to enjoy its humiliations. The pain of tight shoes and strength training, the torture of hair waxing and starvation, the suffering of bottled, unexpressed emotions and denied desires. We ask for it. We pay Gender’s many professional associates – personal trainers, nutritionists, beauticians – to give it to us. More. Pain. Please.
Are you convinced? No? Perhaps just try this on: gendering—including both automatically assigning genders to others and your own efforts to conform to either binary gender yourself—is a BDSM relationship in which the Gender Binary is the top, the Dom, and you and everyone else is the bottom. Now, remember, BDSM roleplay can be really fun and liberating, but usually only after intense, intimate, and precise negotiation of desires, safety and aftercare protocols. How many of us have that conversation with Gender, discussing precisely how we want it to dominate us, and what our limits and our safe words are? Maybe you have! Very good. So now, when you see someone “winning at gender,” or when you yourself feel like you’re winning at gender, when you’re doing gender real good, remember what’s actually happening is:
This BDSM thesis wasn’t at all the framework of last night’s lab games, but it’s what emerged for me and now I can’t unsee it. What I also can’t unsee is the violence of gender assignment in the first place. We are already born — or as the Existentialists say thrown— into this body and time and situation with so many determined conditions and limitations – our genes, our family, the socio-economic and global-political moment, our name… why also, on top of all that, assign an arbitrary collection of RULES FOR HOW TO ACT, BE, DRESS, LOVE, FEEL, EXPRESS, CARE to bind, discipline, dominate, and torture us? One option of rules out of a set of 2? TWO?
It’s fucked up.
Indigo Esmonde destroyed gender for me. I am no longer a Woman. I now proudly (but not finally!) identify as “Something Else” on the Gender Trinary. If you missed the lab, you can see if the Gender Trinary fits your Existential BDSM lifestyle better than the Gender Binary by playing it yourself as this month’s game gift 🎁 .
Gather some friends and each contribute a word or two to describe the 3 available Genders: Man, Woman, and Something Else. Avoid naming any identifying body parts/genitals, but do describe qualities, generic physical characteristics, and typical activities, like “plays sports” or “paints fingernails.” Here are some words we came up with last night, which is by no means any kind of definitive or official list. Make your own damn lists!
Then, have each player take a turn to pick a characteristic from the first category (Man) and ask everyone to self-assess whether they identify with that quality. Everyone who does can give themselves a point and stay in the game. Anyone who doesn’t identify with the word is knocked out of the round and has lost their chance to compete for that title. Next person that stayed in the game can pick the next word, and repeat the process. When one person is left, those who have been knocked out can try to challenge the final contestant by probing them with a word on the Man list that they might not identify with, until they are either knocked out or claim the title a perfect score. Repeat the same process with Woman and Something Else.
You’ll notice some of the terms on our list are intriguingly highlighted! The highlights represent the number of rounds and the specific characteristics it took for us to knock out everyone in the room from each category. So, it took 4 rounds until we found that there was no one who could win the title of “Man” among us, using the probes technically minded, singular focus, unbothered, and violent (no one could self-identity to have all 4 of those descriptors). It took 14 rounds and all of those words highlighted in grey to eliminate anyone from holding the title of a “Woman” though one person came really close to being the champion! Amazingly, 3 co-winners shared the title of “Something Else,” despite 19 diverse descriptive probes. It was glorious to fail at the binary and collectively win at the whatever thing outside of it on which 13 strangers across 9 hours of different time-zones could somehow easily agree on.
What does it mean that everyone failed manliness after only 4 rounds but it took longer to fail womanliness and some people never failed something else?
I think it might say something about which categories on the trinary were more inclusive to our particular collection of humans who voluntarily gathered to play with gender, but is inclusive always and necessarily the same thing as liberating? 🐣 I really don’t know. . . Afterwards, we played some more fun, radical, and liberating games but I can’t tell you about them here – you’ll have to join Indigo’s next Gender Failure workshop! I encourage you to sign up for Daydreams & Associates newsletters and check out the School of Faliure to stay updated about their various offerings! For now, I want leave you with this question: is gender ever useful? if you have an answer, please seriously reply to this email and tell me, because I really can’t come up with any reason it is… But I’m also just one gendered subjected living in a gendered world having a gender paradigm shift moment, and all of this might feel very different for someone else in different circumstances.
🗓 Don't miss any more labs! The Ludic Liberation Lab meets every 2nd Thursday of the month, 6-8:30pm Eastern Time, so add it to your calendar. WE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH ON MARCH 11th!
Do you have feedback and findings from your personal Lab experience that you want to contribute? Please send them to ludicliberation@gmail.com. The email is also where you should send proposals for future playful liberation experiments you’d love to conduct at the Lab! 🎲🔬
from my sub(scription)space to yours,
Natalia (Kitten DJ)
Gamemaker/Destroyer
I absolutely LOVE this analogy. Wonderful! It’s so intriguing and taboo rustling at the same time. You know what, I had a similar thought/comparison going into the night, and wondered if we would venture there. Glad to see someone else was thinking along these lines....sometimes I make strange connections. Ha.
I love this one! I can think of so many examples to support this idea! I immediately thought of the sensation of a tight collared shirt and necktie combined with the thrill of embodying that kind of masculinity. Or the discomfort of a tight, skimpy, sexy pair of underwear. The itch of a full beard, or or hair growing in on recently shaved underarms. As someone who is Genderqueer and also kinky I can see kink play and Gender play in damn near anything (ask me about giant soft drinks and the move theater experience some time lol), but I’ve never really thought of the entirety of Gender itself as fitting under the umbrella of BDSM. It makes so much sense.