Margaret Thatcher’s funeral was earlier this week. She was Britain’s first female Prime Minister and is widely considered to be its most influential leader since the Second World War. Regardless of what you think of her politics, she was undoubtedly hugely successful in her chosen field and a major world figure.
As soon as the obituaries started rolling in I knew there was one word that would inevitably turn up – dominatrix. Sure enough, like many articles written about her during her life, up it popped (for example in Der Spiegel, Slate, The Guardian, etc.). It’s a description that has always annoyed me. It has a very specific sexual connotation. Men can achieve positions of great authority and power without it being tied to their sexuality. A man reaching for authority is treated as normal. Yet if a woman proves to be the best political campaigner, her motives and reasoning are assessed differently. She’s defined not in her own terms, but in reference to the men she’s beaten politically and their feelings. She’s in charge either to satisfy her base sexual instincts for control or because others let her win to satisfy their desire for punishment.
In Margaret Thatcher’s case it strikes me as particularly inappropriate. I was only a young boy when she was in charge, but my kinky personality was already forming, and she never struck me as someone who sexualized power. A dominatrix works within a D/s dynamic that’s created in partnership with a submissive. They are interested in the reaction from their submissive and the interplay of power between them. That might fit some politicians, but Thatcher always came across to me as someone interested only in results. She cared nothing for the journey. She wanted the world a certain way and either you agreed (making you irrelevant) or you disagreed (making you an obstacle to be destroyed). Authoritarianism is not the same as domination.
As this blog shows, I’m a big fan of women who choose to express themselves via domination. But I hate to see women pushed into that group simply because they’re successful and natural leaders.
I originally picked the image for this post as the cricket bat struck me as quintessentially English. It turns out to be a shot from an Austrian fashion designer – Lena Hoshek. So not so English, but still a fun shot with a great 40’s retro feel to it.
