Ian Locklear and Nicole Lavoie, Feminism in the BDSM Lifestyle
In this article series, Clarissa-Jan Lim examines the uneasy relationship between BDSM and feminism by drawing on various feminist debates and the personal stories of BDSM practitioners.
In Part One Clarissa-Jan explores the history of feminism and its views on BDSM. In Part Two she shares the story of a self-proclaimed feminist BDSM couple Ian Locklear and Nicole Lavoie and the ways they reconcile their feminist views with their D/s lifestyle. In Part Three she introduces submissive, Melissa K, who has had to resolve the conflict between her rape fantasies and her strongly feminist ideals.
‘People are living a fantasy, and for us it’s not a fantasy. This is our life. The BDSM is our sex life.’
Ian Locklear and Nicole Lavoie are a quintessential modern couple in their forties. They have outlived failed marriages, raised their respective children, and been affected by the economy crash. Today they live together in Tampa, Florida, where some weeks they visit the Sunday market at the Thai Buddhist temple, get spring rolls and curry, and hang out by the waterway.
He writes structured query language (SQL) code for one of the largest companies in the world, and she is back in school at University of South Florida where she hopes eventually to finish with a doctorate in psychology. They both consider themselves feminists, which in their terms means all people, regardless of gender, are equal and entitled to the same rights and privileges in society. They have known each other for 26 years since their childhood in Florida, and have been a couple for close to two.
Lavoie documents their relationship in her blog, where she writes about her deep love and affection for Locklear, then in lurid detail about how he binds her breasts with white rope, cuffs her to the wall, clamps clothespins on her breasts, strikes her with a thick wooden sex paddle called the stinger, strokes her pussy, commands her to come, again and again, and then flips her over and fucks her until they erupt in orgasm. When they are finished, he cradles her and tells her that she’s a good girl, that he loves her, that she is his.
Locklear and Lavoie are in a BDSM relationship of power exchange and sadomasochism. Locklear is Lavoie’s Dom (or dominant), or Maestro—because she says she simply cannot call him Master—and she defers to him, both in the bedroom and outside of it. Her commitment to Locklear and their relationship is so devout, her trust in him so absolute that she willingly surrenders to him much of her free will.
As part of her submission and the faith she places in him to hurt, not harm her (‘There’s a difference between hurt and harm—and we don’t cross into the harm,’ said Locklear) they have no safeword. Locklear insists it’s not a part of their reality.
‘I think a lot of people will gasp at that, but the difference, I think, is that a lot of people are still playing at BDSM, as opposed to actually living it,’ he said. ‘People are living a fantasy, and for us it’s not a fantasy. This is our life. The BDSM is our sex life.’
‘I am a submissive in my relationship with Ian; I am not a submissive in my life.’
Locklear and Lavoie are feminists who believe in gender equality and challenging oppression and discrimination. So how do they reconcile those values with their participation in acts that many might consider diminishing? How does Lavoie claim to be a feminist, yet—no matter how deep her love and devotion for Locklear—so ungrudgingly relinquish control over her life and submit to him? How do they confront the seeming contradiction between their values of gender equality and having a relationship based on inequality?
Locklear and Lavoie see no gender disparity in their relationship. ‘I don’t think there is any,’ said Locklear, who explained that while there is a hierarchy within the relationship they are still equal as people.
In making big decisions concerning money or their relationship, Locklear has the final say, even if Lavoie disagrees. He maintains that he values her input and her ability to reason, but the responsibility on ‘any given decision’ is ultimately his, as is the power to veto Lavoie’s decisions.
Lavoie insists that she is not entirely powerless. ‘It really comes down to: if there’s a decision to make, we will discuss it. And because as we often do, we will discuss it to the nth degree,’ she said. ‘The final decision is his, obviously, because that’s the decision that we made in our relationship. If I get new information about whatever it is that we’ve made a decision about—he’s made a decision about,’ she corrected herself, ‘I can always bring that new information to him. It’s never just done because he says it’s done.’ If she does end up disagreeing with Locklear’s final decision, she says she trusts him enough to have faith that he does, in fact, believe that it is in the best interest for her, or for their relationship.
‘He’s not going to make a decision to harm me or harm us in our relationship because I will leave. It’s not something I want to do, but we both agree we’ve been in bad enough relationships with other people that we won’t stay in a bad relationship again. And it will suck because we really care about each other, but that sort of “along with great power comes great responsibility”—you know that line? It’s the truth. He’s really responsible for the consequences, no matter what. Good or bad, they’re on him,’ she said.
Lavoie believes that being a feminist means being able to choose who she wants to be and what she wants to do, which is a submissive. ‘As a woman I get to choose who I am and where my strengths are. I am a submissive in my relationship with Ian; I am not a submissive in my life. Other people outside of my home don’t get to treat me as a submissive.’
Lavoie was content in giving up her share of responsibility, as she grew weary of the burden of being breadwinner and decision-maker in her previous marriage. ‘Even before we were a couple, I said to Ian, “I’m tired. I’m sick of being in control all the time. I hate it and it’s not even who I am. I am really and truly submissive by nature,”’ she said. ‘I just hadn’t found anyone I can trust enough to let go and not feel like I have to be so tightly wound all the time—until Ian.’
‘I don’t exercise authority just because I can.’
Locklear and Lavoie established a hierarchy of dominance and submission in the early throes of their romance, which Locklear says eliminated the power struggle that exists in all relationships. ‘We don’t fight for power in this relationship. [But] one final power is she always has the option to leave. She’s not bound here. I also have that same power. I can leave anytime. We both choose to stay because we want to stay and we’re both happy,’ he said. ‘If I don’t care about something I won’t make the decision. So I don’t exercise authority just because I can. If I say I don’t care, I honestly, truly don’t.’
Locklear might not bother deciding whether they have Indian or Mexican for dinner, or committing Lavoie to the errand of picking up his son Josh from school, but on larger issues such as her returning to college after ten years, Locklear has the last word.
‘That was a tough one for me,’ said Lavoie. ‘It’s a terrifying prospect to do something; make that big a change this late in my life. And that was his final decision…And although he said “we” made the decision, he said that to be kind, because I know he made that decision.’
It is a fine, fragile line for Locklear to tread to choose between what he deems is in Lavoie’s best interests and what she actually wants. ‘Her school is a good example,’ he said. Lavoie wanted to study psychology, which was not the discipline Locklear would have chosen for her, but he allowed her to enrol in it. ‘She would probably do whatever it was that I had laid out for her [but] she wouldn’t be as successful or happy with it. And that in the end becomes self-defeating. So I think that comes back to me trying to be a responsible and successful part of this relationship.’
Locklear has a naturally dominant personality. It is quiet and commanding, slightly disarming for a man whose bald head and salt and pepper goatee bring to mind a Hell’s Angel member, albeit with a curious whiff of cerebrality. ‘I’ve always been a very dominant person,’ he said. ‘I don’t necessarily do it on purpose. I wouldn’t know how to exist without responsibility. I have a habit of sitting back and examining a situation until I’m comfortable with it and then stepping in and—whether I want to or not—eventually take over. It’s just who I am.’
His assertive nature sometimes makes him a contentious figure. ‘He is one of those people who people either love or really, really hate,’ Lavoie said. ‘They will either go, “Well I tell ya, Ian just stepped up, took care of that and got it done. He’s such a great guy, he’ll do whatever.” And some people are just like, “That dude is a dick. He just acts like he knows everything.”’
Realising that she was a masochist and enjoyed pain with sex went against everything she learned that sex was supposed to be, growing up.
Although they both acknowledge and celebrate their dominant and submissive characters, Locklear and Lavoie struggled with the sexual gratification they derived from pain. For Lavoie, realising that she was a masochist and enjoyed pain with sex went against everything she learned that sex was supposed to be, growing up. ‘I was raised with a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, so they have really strong feelings about love and sex and romance… I first began becoming sexually aware that I enjoyed pain with my sex especially, and had to repress that for a really long time.’
Lavoie had experimented in the bedroom before, with her former husband. It turned out to be dreadfully abusive, with him using BDSM as a pretext to take advantage of their relationship. She remained averse to it until she met Locklear. ‘Finding someone for me who I could trust to express that side of my sexuality with, who I could trust to inflict that kind of pain but not to go over the limit with it—it’s really walking a tightrope,’ she said.
Lavoie experiences chronic pain due to her Lupus, so although their sex life revolves around pain, she and Locklear must take precautions so that it does not exacerbate the degeneration of her joints. For example, they avoid stress positions because they place a heavy burden on select muscles.
Remarkably, sometimes BDSM helps Lavoie counteract the pain from lupus inflammation. ‘One of the interesting things that I have found is that when I am having a bad pain day, a good strapping (similar to whipping and flogging) helps,’ Lavoie wrote in her blog. ‘It acts like a deep muscle massage; the muscles get worked over and warmed, blood circulation increases, and chemicals are released that make me feel relaxed and free of pain for a while. Masochism lets me choose between the pain I can control (the external pain that Maestro so lovingly doles out) and the pain I can’t control. I choose to manage pain with pain. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me.’
‘Without that consent is just a sick bastard that should be put down…’
Locklear, on the contrary, battled with his sadistic tendencies. He thoroughly revels in being a dominant, but it was difficult for him to come to terms with his thirst for administering pain. ‘That took a lot of soul-searching,’ he said, ‘and just pondering that whole concept of consensualness and really deciding whether or not that was [an] ethically acceptable defence.’
Ultimately, Locklear decided that his partner’s acquiescence was the determining factor in his ability to accept his sadism. ‘There is no way that I would go grab someone off of the streets and do to them what I would do to someone who had consented. I am a consensual sadist. Without that consent is just a sick bastard that should be put down, but with that consent it takes the things that I do and makes them much more palatable, and I can live with myself.’
The roots of sadomasochism remain a mystery, but Locklear believes it stems from some people’s animal instincts. ‘Look at the wider natural kingdom: there is very close association between sex and violence and pain,’ he said. ‘If you look at cats and dogs… Lizards and dolphins, most animals have a very close association between pain and sex—except humans, who tend to try to divorce these two. That should show us that that is primarily because of nurture, not nature. The pain—that’s just getting back in touch with our more natural selves.’
However, he accepts that not everyone has the desire or ability to break out of his or her nurtured sexual leanings. ‘Not everyone wants to get past that, and that’s OK. There’s nothing wrong with that; I don’t think that anyone should be forced to.’
‘Safewords were a form of temporary trust’
In the two years that they have been together, the one thing Lavoie could not bear was having clothespins fastened to her labia—it went beyond even her limits. ‘I have a pretty high threshold for pain, but even that was like, “No. No, no, no. That has to stop right now,”’ she said. ‘When I tell him something is too painful he trusts that I am honest.’
They used no safeword, but he instantly stopped.
‘I rarely blindfold [Lavoie]. Why? Not because the denial of her senses can’t be fun, for both of us, but because being able to see her eyes is far more important and useful even than her words. “The eyes are the doorway to the soul.” Right? Her eyes, her body, the skin, the temperature, the movements, etc. Everything about what she is doing tells me where she is,’ he wrote later in an email. ‘Here’s my theory on safewords. Safewords originated when people were playing with people that they were not intimately connected to. Often they’d meet, play, and never meet again. Safewords were a form of temporary trust. In a committed, close, intimate relationship a safe word isn’t really necessary because we’re in a safe place. At all times.’
Lavoie calls him ‘Maestro’ because he had told her that he would play her like an instrument. ‘Every sound and movement tells me what is going on. I make the decision whether to press on or to stop based on all the information at hand and my desires and goals at the time,’ he said. ‘Some nights, her tears are precisely what I am after and that is what I will have. Sometimes her tears are what she needs, and she knows it. Sometimes her tears are what she needs, and she doesn’t know it. Between our communication and my reading of her at that moment, and some luck, a decision is made. There really isn’t a hard and fast rule. This is part science and part art.’
‘There’s no playing around with that. If I say to him “We can’t do this, it’s entirely too painful,”’ said Lavoie, ‘we have stopped, had a discussion about it, fixed it, did whatever we had to do and start back up again. Because it’s just the nature of having this kind of good, open communication with each other.’ Of utmost importance during their ‘sessions,’ Lavoie stressed, is that she doesn’t try to ‘tough it out’ because then it bears the prospect of causing actual, physical harm.
‘…In his mind, I was property. I no longer existed as a real person.’
Lavoie was decidedly cautious dipping her toes into submission. She had just come out of a damaging relationship with her ex-husband who claimed to be a Dom, and was not about to consider another of that character. ‘My ex-husband was abusive, and when I say he was abusive, we had gotten into this…’ she paused, gathering her thoughts. ‘We were young, we were stupid, we were just trying it out and he had read a bunch of articles about what it is to be a Dom. It kind of took over every part of my life, and not even in the way that this has.’
Although Locklear has profound and authoritative control over her life, Lavoie had felt more gravely subjugated in her previous relationship. ‘He quit his job and I was working like, 70 hours a week to support us. Then I would come home and still have to cook and still have to clean and still be responsible for entertaining him and his other friends,’ she said. ‘His friends, because of the way that our relationship had taken a turn, began becoming really abusive toward me also. And he just allowed it because in his mind, I was property. I no longer existed as a real person. He had said to me that his job was to break me down.’
Before their relationship began, Locklear mentioned being a Dom and wanting to be with a submissive. ‘My response to him was “Yeah—have fun with that,”’ said Lavoie, laughing.
‘Which is fine,’ Locklear replied. ‘I didn’t mean to have a relationship with her of that kind. She was just my friend.’
As friends, they began discussing dominance and her relationship with her ex-husband. ‘I wasn’t trying to convince her of anything,’ he said. ‘What I was trying to do was educate her on the difference between the bully that she was with and what an actual dominant is—not in an effort to try to get her in a relationship with me or anybody else, but just to educate her on the difference.’
Lavoie laughed as she recalled their first time sleeping with each other. ‘It was amazing,’ she turned to him and giggled. ‘It was amazing. It was! But we went really slowly into this because I was scared. So I think the first time we had sex you maybe gave me a light spanking? Maybe?’
Locklear cocked his head, amused. ‘It was a little harder than you seem to remember… But it was only a spanking.’
‘It was only a spanking. And it stayed that way for quite a while because Ian, being the man that he is, wanted me to go very slowly and see what my limits were and what was good for me. But the sex was amazing!
‘I think we take too much fun out of having sex,’ Lavoie said. ‘It’s so taboo that it should only be done one way and that’s crazy. And sometimes your bodies get together and you get sweaty and you start making that fart noise and you know, you’re laughing—sex is fun! I don’t think anybody has the right to tell anybody how they should be having sex.’
To which Locklear, his ardent gaze fixed on her with a tiny upward turn of the mouth, said in jest, ‘I’m going to tell you how to have sex later.’
‘He’s my best friend – he has been for 26 years, and that doesn’t change.’
Locklear and Lavoie have a strong connection built on decades of friendship. ‘We talk about everything. We’d rather…over communicate than under communicate. We’ve never had any significant arguments; [only] minor arguments that really boil down to misunderstandings and miscommunications, which have been pretty rare,’ he mused.
Lavoie was 14 when she met Locklear at a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Their friendship continued intermittently over the next two decades, surviving the collapse of their respective marriages. They reconnected again in 2010, just around Lavoie’s 37th birthday, and had been talking for several months when Locklear caught her off guard. ‘He had made some sort of quip about: “Gosh, you’re so polite. You would make a really excellent submissive,”’ she laughed, and admitted that was when she began to consider a D/s relationship again, this time with Locklear.
She confessed she has always loved with him, since their Rocky Horror teenage years. ‘I fell in love with him when I was really young and I considered myself lucky to be one of the people he considered his friend. He is all of these things that I’ve said—he’s funny and he’s helpful and he’s warm and he’s giving and he’s loving and he’s amazing.
‘When I was a kid… He was always surrounded by people—what we call holding court. Ian was holding court. He would go into a party and find a place to sit down and everybody would bring him stuff,’ she said. ‘I was that kind of shy, young woman who never really felt that confident about herself… I’ve always been in love with him. But I never told him ’cause he was always out of my league.’
‘She’s always underestimated herself,’ said Locklear, and she agreed, nodding sideways, shrugging her shoulders. ‘That’s one of the things we work on.’
Lavoie admits she sometimes has trouble with her self-esteem. When Locklear compliments her, he doesn’t allow her to counter with a negative remark about herself. In one of her blog posts, she wrote about how Locklear helps her work out her confidence issues:
I have a difficult time accepting compliments regarding my looks. So when Maestro whispered to me that I was beautiful I should have smiled and said “thank you” or just smiled, or done nothing at all! What I did was shake my head no and tell him he was wrong. I said it playfully, but I broke the rule, nonetheless.
I wasn’t punished right away. I tried to apologize, over and over again, but he wasn’t having it.
That night we went to bed early, and I honestly thought that he was going to forget about it, I thought he would give me a reprieve. Boy was I ever wrong!
He layed me down on top of the blankets and softly, gently, rubbed my back and ass. I was in heaven until his hand tightened on the back of my neck and his palm came down hard on my ass! Over and over his hand came down on me! I cried and try to pull away or roll over, anything to get away from the pain he was putting me in. He kept saying to me “Say you’re sexy! Say you’re beautiful!” and I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I don’t know if he would have stopped if I had said it, but my first promise was never to lie to him; I haven’t, and I won’t. Though this is the truth to him, it is not to me. I was stuck. I had to take my punishment.
It went on for what seemed like hours! I know it wasn’t, but it sure felt that way! My ass and thighs were sore and bruised, and every touch was like little needles scraping across my skin. I could barely speak from the tears I had choked on and the cries from his strikes.
He pulled me up onto my hands and knees and entered me. His hand was fisted into my hair and he jerked me up into him forcefully, smacking my ass the whole time
[…]
I fell asleep that night, spent, wrapped in his arms but laying on my side. For days I would have the reminder of my insolence each time I sat down, or got out of the tub and looked in the mirror.
“You are mine” says Maestro “You are beautiful, you are sexy. Don’t forget it.”
I might forget just for fun…
As unconventional as their relationship might seem compared to what one might picture as a traditional loving and nurturing couple, Locklear and Lavoie are undeniably, unreservedly in love with each other. Even if sex was absent from their relationship, they’d like to think they would still be together.
‘I think that we’re first and foremost friends before we’re dominant and submissive. He’s my best friend—he has been for 26 years, and that doesn’t change. So would we be together?’ Lavoie asked him. ‘God, I would hate to think that we weren’t having sex anymore.’
Locklear looked at her. ‘That would suck.’
‘That would suck!’ she said, frowning. ‘But if we couldn’t I would still love you.’
‘I’d still love you,’ he agreed.
‘I would probably be fucking somebody else, maybe.’
‘Yeah—that would be an issue for me.’
She giggled, keeping eye contact. ‘Yeah. We’d still be together. We’re going to be those two old farts sitting on the front porch swing—’
‘Bitching about all you kids—’
‘”Oh, they think they’ve got kink down!”’ she affected a crotchety mutter. ‘”Back in my day, we did kink uphill! Two miles in the snow!”’
‘”While there was a hurricane going on!”’
They laughed, she rested her head on his shoulder and he pressed his lips into her hair worn loose. ‘Yeah,’ said Lavoie, ‘We would be together. He’s my best friend.’
