Am I a Brat?

Our author reflects on how parasitically patriarchy shapes her sexual preferences.

By Julia Tautz

"May I?" he asks, looking over from my balcony sofa into the kitchen, where I'm pouring myself a glass of white wine spritzer. I turn around: "May you what?" "Well, look at you?"

Puzzled, I lift the bottle away from the glass. "Did you just ask whether you're allowed to look at me?" I ask in disbelief. He nods and smiles shyly. "Of course you may," I laugh, not knowing what to think. Because in this exact spot where I'm standing now, two weeks ago my other date neither asked nor hesitated. Instead of a greeting, he simply pushed me against the wall and flung my underwear across the kitchen. I like thinking back to that, even though I don't quite know yet why that kind of forcefulness turns me on.

Because actually I hate every form of authority, in bed too, where I'm an anarchist. I want to stay in control, and yet it feels much more familiar and, absurdly, safer to place myself in the hands of someone who clearly takes the lead. Especially when you haven't slept together very often yet. Because when I think back, giving instructions tended to be met with surprise. It often cost me too much energy, so I preferred to stay in tried-and-tested sub mode.

"Well, then you're a switch," my current date says after our first time. We're still lying naked in bed, reading cat tarot cards, and I'm somewhat stunned that he's the first man in my bed who asks for my consent at every next step of foreplay. It's bitter how naturally I never kept my own boundaries and needs in view, all
while telling myself it turned me on.

"Or am I more of a brat?" I ask back. When I signed up for the sex app Feeld, the categories listed there, clearly the work of a translation AI, were "Göre" and "Görenbändiger/in". Most of my queer-feminist friends find this German rendering of "brat" and "brat tamer" awful, but the word makes me think first of all the characters in my favorite children's books and how, for my teenage self, rules only ever existed to be broken. Anything but fitting the image of the well-behaved schoolgirl!

For a long time I wasn't aware that even this position is part of the patriarchal role play. Within the BDSM hierarchy too, the brat is submissive; she rebels and pushes back against the dominant partner's control, but without ever questioning the hierarchy itself. That would actually suit me well, and at the same time I want to resist this label immediately. Does that make me the ideal brat? My few experiences as a dom were clearly marked by wanting to hand the sub as much power as possible, so he could break my rules.

However I turn it around: patriarchy still plays the most dominant part in my bed.