A further thought:

It's important to be absolutely clear that the politics of equal rights (to use a safer term since some people find "feminism" provocative) should be entirely separate from the question of whether women are "naturally" submissive. ("Natural" is a weasel word in sexual politics: it's often used as an equivalent to "God's will", i.e. what ought to be, regardless of whether it actually is that way or not.)

Women's "natural" submissiveness can be argued back and forth: I don't know where sexologists stand these days, but in the last century Anthony Storr was maintaining that "A woman who behaves aggressively towards men is either frightened... or else is trying to force the man to overpower her by provoking him. ... Women who do have truly sadistic desires are are more commonly identifying themselves with men, and, if they act upon such feelings, will therefore generally experience them in terms of a Lesbian (sic) relationship." (Sexual Deviation, Panther, 1964)

But even if it were conclusively proved that the majority of women have an innate urge to sexual submission (which I don't believe, but supposing for purposes of argument), this shouldn't have any bearing on their legal and social rights. Firstly because averages are not individuals: the fire service is right to require its staff to meet standards of strength and stamina, but it wouldn't automatically exclude women because the average woman can't meet those standards. And secondly, because, as has been amply discussed above, private D/s roles are irrelevant to a person's choices or abilities in authority structures in everyday life: so excluding someone from responsible roles because of their sexual submissiveness would be as unfair as any other kind of discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.

This may sound as if I'm flogging a dead horse, and should stick to live ponygirls. But I suspect that a lot of the tension over feminism versus M/f stems from the way women's supposed tendency to go weak at the knees before dominant men has been used to justify social oppression: so I wanted to get that well out of the way so we could go on without it.