A very rough sketch.
The much-bemoaned sexist model* of straight sexuality centers an active masculine subject acting upon a passive feminine object. At its best, this is consensual role-playing. At it’s worst it is socially snactioned rape. In some recent conversations, I’ve become interested in the ways that stone sexual practice turns this dynamic inside out. [*Or the feminist model of the sexist model, perhaps.]
Note: I am referring to the classic stone butch/femme model as I understand it, the key indicators of which include: butch and femme as active and receptive respectively, no direct stimuation of the stone butch partner, and femme pleasure and satisfaction as the guiding objective, measure of success, and criterion for completion. Many have made mention of the last item — feminine enjoyment as raison d’être — in analyzing the differences between classic butch/femme frameworks and heteronormative frameworks.
How do we assign subject/object functions in a sex act? Are they by definition the same as active/passive roles? Do we read sex like a sentence so that the “object” is recipient of a subject’s performance of a verb? And if so then through what unsound cipher is such a sentence translated? (See: penetrate vs engulf.)
Or do we read sex like analyzed text, jumping from subject/object to objectification? Does object mean “object of desire”? Whose? What do we talk about when we talk about sexual objects?
A thought experiment: To whatever extent the “object” is a person who functions “merely [solely]* as an instrument (object) towards the [other] person’s sexual pleasure,” we can say that stone butch/femme practice inverts the subject/object relationship, giving us not masculine-active-subject & feminine-receptive-object, but rather masculine-active-object & feminine-receptive-subject. [*I dislike the connotation of "merely" for this case, though the denotation is correct.]
And this — the subject/object inversion — is the key difference between classic butch/femme practice and the heteronormative model. Perhaps I’m too literal, but it’s right there in the name.
(Is the animate object moving where movement should not be?)
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