Kink and Gender

I've been having lots of thoughts about gender lately. A lot of these thoughts came up a few weeks ago, when I had the AMAZING experience of touring Kink.com headquarters at the San Francisco Armory (this was so great - if you're ever in SF, do it!). For such a sex-positive, inclusive, really wonderful space, I was really surprised at the gender-normativity of a lot of their work. Just a few examples:

• They have two separate wrestling themed sites, one with male wrestlers and one with female wrestlers. Occasionally, they'll film with a live audience - the female wrestlers' audience is mixed-gender, but the male wrestlers' audience is exclusively male. The reason? Gay men watching the male wrestling site don't want to see women in their porn.
• The fourth floor of Kink.com is called The Upper Floor, which is a breathtakingly gorgeous, elegant space that is home to play parties open to the San Francisco kink community. There are a special group of slaves (BDSM submissive - it's a totally consensual arrangement that brings pleasure to all parties, so please don't be offended by the term) who are the slaves of The Upper Floor - it's the ultimate goal for slaves at Kink.com, and it's a very special honor to be in that group. Which is all women. Because that's what their online audience responds to.
• I attended a rope bondage class while at Kink.com. It was SO AWESOME and fun and fabulous and totally different from anything I'd ever done before! Also, all of the people who attended the class were in couples that were male-dominant, female-submissive. All of them. One of the women actually got annoyed with me when I suggested that some people might be turned on by switching power roles once in a while.

Okay, so here's my analysis. I totally get that Kink.com is a business, and as a business, they need to cater to their customers' preferences in order to be profitable. So I am completely sympathetic to their situation. I guess I'm just surprised, since a kinky porn site is already so far from mainstream, that their customers would be so very mainstream in their desires. I know that there's a market for gender-bending porn and porn that is inclusive to women and porn that promotes gender equality - I know because I work with that market every day. Unfortunately, it seems that those are not the people (or at least not the majority of the people) who pay for porn site access.

In my ideal world, a porn company would hear from their customers that they prefer seeing only female slaves on The Upper Floor, and they would say, "Too bad for you! We don't want to prevent our male slaves from being able to achieve the highest level of slavedom." Or if online subscribers preferred to only see male audience members at a gay male pornographic wrestling match, they would say, "Sorry! Sometimes women get off by watching men have sex, just like how some men get off by watching women have sex, and all of that is okay!"

The problem is, we are all socialized to see gender constructs as necessary and true. It's so deeply ingrained in us that even those of us who have rejected all sorts of other societal norms still get off on seeing men in dominant roles and women in submissive roles (and for many of us, participating in those roles as well!). It doesn't even mean that's necessarily what we like in life outside the bedroom - it means that these roles are so deeply embedded in our psyches that our minds interpret this kind of power dynamic as pleasurable. I don't even see this as an inherently good or bad thing - I just find it fascinating. The human mind - wow! And its effects on the economics of running a porn company. And how that can unwittingly contribute to reinforcing gender stereotypes in our society. I love how it's all connected. In a way, it's kind of brilliant to see the whole system and how it works through us. Thoughts?