Michael Robbins is not precisely bad kink representation. I can’t call him that, even as his essay, published in Harper’s Magazine (175 years of arts and culture!) makes me viscerally recoil. He themes together two things, the safe, tidy masochism as curated by his domme, G, and the anxious despair of the apocalyptic nature of climate change. And he wrote some free verse imagining Percy Shelley with a Bazooka, in that sort of liminal self indulgence that we award ourselves post play, under the banner of aftercare. I can’t begrudge that, either. We are entitled to our pleasures.
But I can unpack why my skin crawls. I suppose I can succinctly observe the biggest flag is in his essay’s title. He calls his poetry “Domme Songs”, which, sure, but these are not the songs of a Domme, they are his songs, excerpts from the inside of his head, about his experiences. His example in the essay isn’t even a song about her, she’s just conveniently adjacent. And there’s something very boiled down there about the experiences of one’s own annihilation in the summation of a submissive fantasy. You become not a person experiencing, wanting and acting upon these desires, but someone doing for, even as the fantasy uses you as the fulcrum and the engine for everything that happens.
The woman he has decided to call “G” works into his purposes because she’s ever so safe and useful. To make his point, he details a relationship (only mentioning once she was hired) based on going to her Bushwick apartment for sessions of sadism, interspersed with little mundanities about X-Men comics and Big Thoughts (or at least Big Feelings) about climate change and how he thinks his desires relate to it. And you couldn’t ask for a better, accidentally accurate snapshot of shitty sub behaviour.
Of course, I do not begrudge him his release or his catharsis. I don’t even mind that his submissive fantasies are inherently selfish. All fantasies are. What frustrates me is that I live in a world where masochists and submissives get so much more space to be considered, for people to understand them and nod about how this is an essential and valid route to transcendence and processing your feelings, practically medicinal and thus virtuous. This is also a world where sadists and dominants like myself are supposed to be midwives to the birth of another’s transformations, nothing more or less. Indeed, if anything more is asked, the fantasy of us being the bad guy becomes a real accusation.
Robbins is too good a writer not to have some glimmer of self awareness, knowing on some level what he is doing is all about him, a recursive and contained experience. Where he first falters is that he is a pretentious git who thinks he is particularly insightful in this particular zone. For example, he contrasts the high camp image of BDSM with his precious grasping at authenticity, saying “I want a woman to truly despise me”, but no buddy, you do not. You have a bog standard piece of the “enemies to lovers” trope where a million insightful romance fans pass around the unfortunately not firmly attributable quote that to be hated requires being seen, and to pass through that hate requires real acceptance by your lover. You want the emotion of the moment to work, and we can credit you need the ineffable thing generally short handed to “chemistry”, but you are a simple person thinking you are complicated.
Sure you don’t necessarily want the weird theatrical outfits breaking your immersion, but for Christ’s sake, Robbins, you still want aesthetic dominion and you think your baby like tantrum if you don’t get it is just how things work. Pouring out a PSL as capitalist trash does not make your cute little cup of machine drip from a diner more “real” coffee. But Robbins goes one step further and essentially demands everyone not remind him both are coffee in a cardboard cup someone else made at his behest. He needs the person making coffee to pretend it’s a gift.
You almost think he gets it when he describes in the most condescending women-preaching-is-dogs -walking-on-their-hind-legs that despite his domme having never read Judith Butler she implicitly gets performativity. But holy fuck, is there also no self awareness of anything but his own sucking neediness.
(G, by the way, ended the relationship when she left the city to go to grad school.)
Robbins, you utter fucking dingdong, Butler’s theories have long since duffused into common understanding. You not grasping them is a failure on your part. I’ve never read Butler either (though I have listened to some of their lectures) because I don’t have to, any more than I need to have read Lord of the Rings to orient myself in the genre of fantasy. But, Robbins wants himself to be special and profound, ground breaking and relatable while clearly having only superficial familiarity with the thing he claims to be all consumingly obsessed with.
For example, as he scoffs, people unfamiliar with BDSM describe it as “whips and chains” but he wouldn’t even know where one would get a whip. He lives in New York, by the way, with multiple excellent sex shops. And in a world with the internet, including Etsy. Instead, he facetiously speaks of how there was a riding crop involved, but it broke. Robbins is either being incredibly disingenuous or he is putting himself forward as having a relatable summation of the emotional geography of kink, when he is closer to someone who has seen that landscape in a painting in a museum on a completely different continent, and it really moved him, man.
Occam’s razor suggests he is like a million other men out there with long standing submissive fantasies, but to whom the process by which one realizes them is best left to the professionals or the wives and girlfriends acting in that capacity. He has never actually looked at how one goes about getting a whip because any iota of practicality shatters his brain into a million pieces. What happened is G was responsible for working that part out, much like she was responsible for knowing burning his penis with a hot curling iron was a bad idea.
No really, Robbins is just sort of a useless dumbass about all this, wanting someone else to take responsibility for realizing his vision. Paragraph after paragraph of useless dumbass.
And when he talks about G he still doesn’t get it, not really. In narrative, she snaps his balls with a rubber inner tube, but she bakes him cinnamon rolls. I start to hope we get to see her as a whole person, but nope. Her sadistic actions are attributed to studying hard at classes in his local BDSM community, but it would never occur to him to attend them alongside her. The essay is not an inaccurate portrait of an actual domme from the outside looking in. But, when he quotes her actual voice of talking about feeding off of his energy, the fucker than compares her to the rapacious forces of capitalism destroying the climate. Because of course he wants to imagine himself as the virgin forest being burned, and our hypocrisy around that.
No, you fucking numbskill. You ninny. You absolute nincompoop. She’s talking about the white hot thrill of the way the essential empathy of Sadism shoots you into the stratosphere. The way the power trip of power exchange makes you feel uplifted, when you play a person exactly right. It’s a perfect moment, like hitting exactly the correct note to harmonize on a song or choosing precisely the best possible words to convey everything you meant to say when you are writing.
What we are not not is fucking FRACKERS. The people destroying the world that way don’t thrill at the way the consequences of our greed are a shot in the balls. They desperately deny, requiring everyone to agree what morally pure people they are and at best how much the consequences can’t be helped. He acknowledges green washing and whatnot, but can’t get himself out of his weird, penitent head up ass pretzel.
Robbins also quotes as follows:
Gilles Deleuze recognized, “masochism always has a theatrical quality that is not to be found in sadism.”
And I want to yell at him that nobody lets us. That they are absolutely terrified of us, so much so that the only place sadism gets to admit it’s there is the worst of crimes, biblical infants dashed on stones; calls to punish the worst people that suspiciously affirm all our bigotry; revenge after being wronged for crimes worse than death; all circumstances where the instinct to flense your lover because you love them so are very much not invited. The best you can hope for is to be a book boyfriend or someone’s dominatrix, paid or not.
Anything G says is not to be taken seriously, or to be presumed to be in service to his needs. He never, at any point, seems to think about what he might be providing her. He doesn’t say money (even though he met her is a professional context), but if he acted like he does in this essay during their relationship I can see why she casually fantasized about cutting his tongue out. But I cannot emphasize enough how much Robbins did not and does not care about what his ostensible domme wants.
Despite this, we do get a rare moment of G’s actual voice and motivation peeking through, her clear feet on the ground, earthy understanding of the body and the mind. Likely if you were at all familiar with the New York BDSM scene you could even extract out who she actually is (or possibly if she’s a composition of a couple of people). Nonetheless, Robbins is very firm not to let her be the focus of things. This essay is about where he’s coming from, not where he is, and definitely not who she is. G, the domme has a place, and that’s to be the usual literary mother-wife, carrying yet another generation of earnest dude writers through their neurosis so they can spit out the words we laud them for.
Of course, facing even a hint of having something harder asked of him than getting off, Robbins takes time to whine about the indignity of having to articulate his needs, mewling about advice for couples trying to communicate their fantasies with each other better. Masochists, he wants us to understand, are owed not having to do the labour of even so much journaling or using indirect communication when they want something from their partner involving abstract feelings. For him, the mystery of the work involved to unscrew the emotional messes they get themselves into should be kept from a masochist with the same swan glide effortlessness appearance of a woman never letting her husband see her in curlers, or face unpainted.
It’s not on him, the professional poet, to extract and accurately describe what he is feeling! It’s laughable to him that anyone who is a masochist could. Here he inserts that stale joke about the sadist refusing to hurt the masochist, because Robbins gets to publish in prestigious literary magazines about his penis (metaphorical and literal), but he doesn’t need to be at all original about this. Heaven forefend a man not speak in cliches!
Robbins, as he describes himself, is actually just a bad submissive, the kind lifestyle dominants on kink forums see therapists about after breaking up with. He is the sort of sub that ends their marriages in cheating, because their wife isn’t doing it properly, but has the audacity to tell them this is work. These people, usually men, are legion, but though Robbins thinks he defines the soul of masochism, most masochists are not this tedious or lazy.
And yet he says (when someone essentially calls him self indulgent) that “No one has ever escaped the trap of sexual anxiety and longing and dissatisfaction”. But I wonder if he has actually thought at all about how that applies to G, or if he’s too busy worrying about his koan level contradictions over whether he is pathetic or not? Does he consider, outside of himself and his literally masturbatory ontological loop, what being pathetic might actually mean? That G could feel hurt, rejection or insecurity?
I don’t think so. I think the idea of the dominant as a whole person is something he needs to blank out from his brain before he gets hard. He can sort of play along with relationship things, a bit, but then she needs to retreat and let him take charge of how things are supposed to work. he needs her to perform like this is some sort of lifestyle set up, but ultimately have the final say.
Perhaps his seeming selfishness is actually Robbins is just being weirdly coy about admitting this was sexwork and how that’s tilting things. A lot of people who have no experience with BDSM outside of fantasy think the only dommes that could possibly exist are paid, and some of the weirdness of his behaviour might make more sense through that lense. More silliness on his part of so, though, because neglecting to mention the transactional nature of things is also very self serving.
But, in lifestyle land, by contrast I am writing this after having a conversation this morning that went like this:
“I want,” I said “to put a corset around your waist, here.”
My hands pressed on Silver’s ribs, only lightly, inhabiting the sensation of the squeeze as much as I envisage it. My minds eye makes it a heavy rubber corset, as much feeling the ribs pull in as the way the latex scent is a full on taste that sticks to your hands and climbs as much into your mouth as your tongue.
“Plugged,” I say. I can feel the way the ring of the asshole remains aware of something there. I can’t know prostates except as an outside observer, but imagine it well enough and predictably to get what I want. The rest is effortless to understand. “And maybe something for your nipples. The suction things, or maybe some clips. A hood over your head, arms bound.”
I do not describe the next “and then” that I am going to stimulate the hell out of his penis, probably until he comes. Maybe after I split lines of vivid pink over his ass and thighs with a whippy bit of bamboo. I’m casting this out to him like a fishing lure, going to hook him, going to drag him up to the bank and split into his psyche to see all the guts inside. The act of this describing is foreplay for us both. I told him another version of this fantasy last night, shared the bones of it at the start of the week. I stretch out an act that’s probably going to be over way too soon to last us longer than the moment.
The practicals of being a domme often are in the doing, and as a sadist, I sensibly chose a masochistic partner to make it plausible to have things function. But, here was another important piece in choosing Silver, a self awareness he could carry with his fantasies. Sure, like all people, he wants it to feel “real”. Our ability to furnish this immersion together, however, is an essential part.
Robbins has none of this. Faced with G’s ability to get into his head and get past his anxiety he simply says “I’m just not sure what precisely it is she’s good at.” And good lord, is that not just a summation of his opinion of her. He cannot get it through his cinnamon roll stuffed head that she’s doing anything other than magic.
Silver, my sub, knows why I am good at it, but more than that, he knows why he’s good at subbing (and bottoming). It’s an incredibly important reason why he can have me following him around our apartment, pulling his hair, harrying at him, shoving him against walls. Why Silver gets to have someone who can say the nastiest things to him is because I can do it with the absolute confidence of one who steps forward and expects if the floor won’t be there to meet her feet, his face sure as hell will.
It’s one long trust fall. Together.
But Robbins, in trying to explain BDSM to his audience, cites Venus in Furs. Specifically in his example, popping a few highlights of Sacher-Masoch’s imagined sufferings of Severin in the thrall of Wanda. But, Wanda, once upon a time was a real woman. Masoch did not invent that character in his story. She was a figment of his wife’s own fantasy, in playful letters sent to an author she was trying to relate to as another writer. Venus in Furs, by contrast, is the dogged insistence of a man to force his masochistic fantasy through in replacement of a collaboration, the end of his real world marriage. Masoch had a real domme. He was just far too controlling to keep her, too interested in even stealing Wanda herself to remake her as his own character.
Robbins, in his own pomposity, seeks freedom from his sense of victimization and guilt by passing through them at the labor of someone else’s shoving. Likewise, he tries to tie his kinks to sophisticated forces, the big canon art shit and sky tearingly great terrors of eras past. But he shows his whole ass again when he compares himself to G in relation to background and role. Everywhere in his relationship to her and his sexuality she is his ministering angel, a service provider. She’s not a fellow academic on her own intellectual journey and his peer, she’s his romantic interlude with a pretty young thing that uses surprisingly big words for… being the sort of person who is in the business of sexwork with literary weirdos?
Even his apocolyptic anxiety is oddly a bubble that includes only himself and the earth. Everything else is terror and tricks and disappointment but it’s all pointed at him. It’s the end of the world, but as he tells it, that’s something he is facing more or less alone. To Robbins, climate change is a personal insult.
I type this with a nasty pressure in my chest, a reminder. I need to pause to remember my inhaler. I grew up, mostly, directly across the bay from the largest oil refinery on the eastern seaboard. A dying, industrial town, that also boasted a pulp mill that reeked sweet, like the aftertaste of aspartame. My family was poor and bad at managing things, the house old and full of mice and dust. After Covid shredded my lungs the first time I got a diagnosis of asthma, but I know it came earlier. Now there’s forest smoke, my country burning, burning. Any shred of stopping that burning on our end has been folded away in favour of preparing to fend off a bigger, meaner, nastier country.
And the air quality, probably, will eventually be part of what kills me. It’s the same air, on the west coast, that mirrors the smokey air on the east coast that Robbins swims through while twitching with his nervous anxiety. But what strikes me, more than anything else is his firm conviction that he found a bosom he can seek comfort in particular to his masochism, a safe mean mommy to hold his hand through the dying times.
BDSM, in our world, doesn’t offer dommes that. It gives me philosophical ideas of consent and skill based classes, sure. But, there’s no economy of pro subs to whom I can reliably pay a few hundred an hour to make a little chapel to alleviate my anxiety, no infrastructure of helpful men whose job it is to understand my fantasy needs implicitly, while I act like an elitist prick about their education relative to mine. Myself, even inhabiting the authenticity of desires people will supposedly pay top dollar for, don’t get to exist outside the context of what is essentially alternative therapies and commissioned acts of art for a patron. I can be an acupuncturist, and have people argue I do real things to them. I can even not charge for it as a public good. But I cannot be someone who just wants to stick needles into people for fun. For my own reasons, such as liking them.
And I feel the quote, by Buttress here, in Brutus, is apt:
“And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t wishing / For untimely death or demise / Or am I just wishing I could be like you? / That the people would see me too as a poet / And not just the muse”
And that, Robbins, is a heck of a lot closer to an actual Domme song.
