Help me check BDSM’s privilege at the next KinkForAll unconference

02 Mar 2012 at 01:13

maymay

Community, Kink events, Politics of sex

8 Comments

The irony of what I’ll momentarily write about makes me giggle. The rawness of it makes me sad. And the details of it make me very angry.

Last Saturday, February 25th, dozens upon dozens of people converged on the Tivoli Student Union for KinkForAll Denver (KFADEN). To many, the event was a thrilling and eye-opening experience. To some, it was that, and also deeply painful and uncomfortable. That discomfort was expressed most publicly today in an article by Jenn Wohletz published in the Denver Westword:

[S]everal prominent local kinksters were noticeably missing, including Denver’s premiere dominatrix and kink community leader Mistress Saskia[…].

[…]

Mistress Saskia says she believes [maymay] is on a “personal crusade to attack the kink community[…].”

This makes me giggle because if one knows anything about me in relation to KinkForAll, one probably knows of personal attacks two professors named Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks made against me for being a BDSM-friendly sex-positive activist. Way back in 2010, I was too BDSM-friendly for the religious right. Now, in 2012, I’m apparently too anti-BDSM for “the kink community”? Go figure.

Understanding KinkForAll

Before I go any further, it’s important to understand what KinkForAll is, as well as what it is not:

  • KinkForAll is a coordinated autonomous action, akin to a flashmob-style conference, at which every person regardless of age, affiliation, ethnicity, orientation, identity (gender or otherwise), race, or any other characteristic may participate.
  • KinkForAll is not “a BDSM conference,” nor is it a conference “to learn about BDSM.” Nevertheless, to date, learning about BDSM has happened at every single KinkForAll unconference ever produced.
  • KinkForAll is a non-hierarchically organized collective of people who work in concert towards one and only one shared goal: making KinkForAll unconferences happen.

Here’s the tricky one, the one most people fail to understand the hard radical implications of:

  • KinkForAll is not a legal, political, personal, financial, corporate, or government entity of any kind. In other words, KinkForAll is a social technology, a methodology, and a pattern of behavior. KinkForAll is not an individual event. It is not the sum of multiple events. It is a blueprint, a framework, and an idea with an arguably confusing name. Specific KinkForAll unconferences are not KinkForAll and KinkForAll is not a specific unconference. Each informs the other, but only in the same way that the Atlantic Ocean informs Lake Eerie and vice versa.

Since that confuses many people, let me break it down in practical terms:

  • No individual or group who donates money, time, or energy towards making KinkForAll unconferences happen is in any way more or less entitled to determine the content of a specific KinkForAll unconference than any other individual or group. Saying “there are no taboo conversations,” means just that: you get to come and say whatever you want.
  • At the same time, no individual or group who donates money, time, or energy towards making a specific KinkForAll unconference happen is in any way more or less entitled to alter the structure of KinkForAll unconferences. Saying “there are no pre-scheduled presentations,” and “sexual activity is not welcome during the KinkForAll unconference” means just that: if you want to do a presentation at a KinkForAll unconference, you must physically show up, find an open slot on the schedule grid, and execute your presentation within the space and time constraints of that slot. You must also refrain from “having sex,” including and especially behaving erotically and exhibitionistically—whatever and no matter what that means for you—at KinkForAll unconferences.

One point in the above exposition is so important it deserves being repeated: learning about BDSM has happened at every single KinkForAll unconference ever produced. This same fact cannot be said for an inordinately huge number of other topics, such as disability rights and its intersection with sexuality (to name just one of many possible examples). Every KinkForAll unconference has historically lacked discussions on these other intersectional topics.

The reason for this is simple: KinkForAll is a privileged space for BDSM’ers. BDSM’ers are now, and have always been, the dominant social group at every KinkForAll unconference. Don’t take my word for it, take Jeff Jizz’s, Mistress Saskia’s husband, a KinkForAll Denver participant, and a person referenced in Jennifer Wohletz’s article about the event. By Jeff’s own count of the participants at KinkForAll Denver:

I would say at least 50% of the attendees I saw were BDSM’ers and that number would have been much higher if shit did not hit the fan.

BDSM topics have historically overwhelmed the session grids at KinkForAll unconferences. As I said on Facebook:

KinkForAll’s less-represented participants, such as people of color, people with disabilities, even self-identified “vanilla” people, have consistently hesitated to lead sessions on topics they, themselves, deemed too far askew from BDSM. I’m certain these people have valuable things to say, yet the degree to which many have internalized “not being kinky enough for KinkForAll”—which means not having enough BDSM Scene cool points—has kept many hesitant and fearful of participating.

This is not a surprise. The predominance of BDSM-centrism at KinkForAll unconferences meant that it has been at the mercy of all the systemic racism, classism, and inaccessibility of the BDSM Scene proper.

This, despite the fact that the “Kink” in KinkForAll is not synonymous with BDSM. This, despite the fact that I have been making that point ever since the moment KinkForAll was conceived, years ago. This, despite the fact that so many structural aspects of KinkForAll—its 20-minute session limit, its reliance on crowd sourcing rather than on making purchases with money—were intentionally designed to counteract the systemic influences that make so many BDSM-centric events largely accessible only to people who are white, heterosexual, class-privileged, cisgendered, able-bodied, and so on.

BDSM has moved up; it has taken up a lot of room at KinkForAll unconferences. It is time for BDSM to move back, to talk a little less, and to listen to others a little more. Since “BDSM” is not a person, and since KinkForAll is structurally designed to ensure discussions on any topic cannot be unilaterally excluded, it is up to us, collectively, to check BDSM’s privilege at specific KinkForAll unconferences when we participate in them.

BDSM Scene-State figureheads are not good role models

I have personally spent an enormous amount of energy encouraging people who, for instance, want to wear their “vanilla boots” to a KinkForAll unconference to do so. In the past, other unorganizers and passionate community builders—people like Emma, Aida Manduley, Rebecca Crane, and Ben K.—have done the same. Sadly, such people’s valuable contributions have yet again gone largely unacknowledged in favor of hurling ad-hominen insults against me and people I care about. For instance, in reference to Alisa, Jeff wrote:

UPDATE: It looks like the comments from which I quote, below, written on a post by a KFADEN participant (named Isaac, the person pictured in Jenn Wohletz’s article) were made inaccessible to many people. Since I couldn’t possibly imagine that Isaac wants to limit the reach of anyone’s voice who weighed in with an opinion on his post (he is staunchly anti-censorship, after all!) you can download a copy of the thread here. If you use the Safari browser on Mac OS X, you can download a .webarchive of it here.

Lol oh look another star fucker. Just read her blog and you can see whose blog whoring dick is up her ass.

That is stupid and a waste of time. But more to the point, devaluing a woman’s work based on who she fucks is the very definition of sexism and sex-negativity.

Yes, these verbal jabs may be stupid and a waste of time, but they hurt. They hurt a lot. But you know what hurts a whole lot more? Feeling abandoned and thrown to the beasts of -isms by a self-identified anti-oppression “community.”

And that’s why I said this on the KinkForAll mailing list:

[S]ince no one else seems to be able or willing to do so, I just want to point out the fucked-up-ness of a lauded BDSM Scene member who owns a for-profit BDSM venue with his married partner calling me and Alisa “blog whore”s and “pimps,” (and, as an aside, WHAT is WITH all the sex work slurs, Jeff?! For fuck’s sake, YOU AND YOUR WIFE OPERATE A PRO-DOMME HOUSE AND MAKE AND SELL PORN!) who calls Alisa’s “voice…just an extension of Maymay’s,” erasing her agency by using misogynistic ad-hominem insults.

I’m not surprised at Jeff’s behavior. I’m *disappointed* in everyone else who’s apparently too invested in this BDSM Scene-State Work-Play economy that they’re not saying one peep about, or at least not *noticing* behavior like Jeff’s. Don’t you fancy yourselves well-versed and sensitive to anti-oppression work? Is Jeff’s social capital that strong? Is that not also a form of power worth criticizing?

And in making these points I’m not even talking directly about the way behavior like Jeff’s effects *me,* or Alisa (despite the fact that it does). Rather, I’m talking about the structural ways behavior like Jeff’s contributes to a system called the BDSM Scene that keeps submissive-identified people of any gender from claiming personal autonomy, that makes it easy for abusers and rapists to prey in BDSM venues, and worse. Jesus fucking christ, people! This dynamic mirrors an abused person defending their abusers. What are we so afraid of or hurt by that makes it difficult to see this clearly?!

On a personal note, Jeff’s comments about Alisa make me angry because they read to me as simultaneously saying Alisa can’t be her own woman AND that I can’t be anything other than a typical, dominant male. This is similar to how angry I was at my ex-partner’s dad when I learned that he faulted me for corrupting her into being sexually dominant. It’s why I rage against statements from academics like Robin Morgan’s that insist male submission is an expression of “envy.” It’s part of why Donna Hughes attacked ME and not my then-partner. That shit makes me want to punch walls. If you can’t see Alisa as the independent, powerful person she is, Jeff, then you can’t see me as being a human with vulnerabilities and authentic submissive desires, either. And for that, fuck you very much.

And also, shame on everyone else who might’ve called Jeff out on that sexist bullshit but chose not to because he’s a friend (and no one wants to hurt their friends) or because he could ban you from the RACK Room and that would suck for you.

Your behavior, Jeff, is why the BDSM Scene is a sexist and sexually-classist environment. That others are more invested in their affiliations with The Scene than in seeing that Scene structure for the oppressive system it is makes them complicit in that sexism and classism, too. And that’s the reason why *I* am going to continue to make sure privileged BDSM bullshit is made uncomfortable by me, as an individual, *and* why I want KinkForAll unconferences to remain events at which *discussions* (not demos) about BDSM are no more or less encouraged by the *structural building blocks of the event* as any other topic.

If that last sentence seems like a paradox to you, Jeff (or anyone else reading, for that matter), then I invite you one more time to schedule a coffee date with me while I’m in town (I leave Colorado on March 6th) so we can ACTUALLY TALK about this.

Otherwise, go jump off a cliff, like I did. Maybe your Open Source Sexuality group (which you started on the same day as KFADEN, awesome!) can be that cliff for you. I genuinely wish you all the luck in the world making that a success. I would love to see it thrive here in Denver. It wouldn’t be the first time people who had a bad taste in their mouths about KinkForAll decided to do their own thing, and I am actually REALLY HAPPY (really) to see other people *doing* interesting stuff, even if it’s got nothing to do with KinkForAll.

Checking your privilege does not feel good. If some BDSM Scene’sters in Denver are feeling a little wounded, if the “premier dominatrix” of the Denver BDSM Scene is feeling pissed off that the red carpet wasn’t just rolled out for her on-demand, if the BDSM Scene’s aristocracy did not feel that their star-bellied sneech-stars were admired enough at this one event, that’s because KinkForAll Denver is not about them; fuck them, because this isn’t for them, anyway.

It’s also not about me. But in trying to shift the focus away from what KinkForAll Denver is actually about and towards me instead, the puny kings of puny hills are able to gleefully maintain the privileges they’ve become indebted to and simultaneously infuriatingly ignorant of.

Substantive reporting about KinkForAll Denver could have talked about the ideas that were discussed—yes, including the one I’m writing about right now—or the serendipitous interactions that participants had, interactions which may not have happened otherwise. It could have talked about what it means to expose a group of active, engaged people to a methodology for producing low-cost, extremely social events that challenge everything about familiar status quos. It could have critiqued the way KinkForAll succeeds or fails to engender self-empowerment from each participant. It could have asked questions about the nature of educational systems, what collaborative relationships look like and how to build them, the accessibility or inaccessibility of sexual information, ways to identify entrenched bigotries and how best to excise them, and much, much more.

Participating in a KinkForAll unconference is about the intense challenge of putting oneself in an uncomfortable but not dangerous situation, of learning how to “move up” and claim your personal autonomy, your agency, and your power when you need to, and learning how to “move back” to respect others who share this home we call Earth. KinkForAll unconferences are self-empowerment training areas. Unless you turn them into something else. Ironically, KinkForAll is designed to let you turn it into whatever you want it to be. Why squander that?

KinkForAll is an intense event. It is not designed to be a “safe space” event. Rather, it is designed to encourage people, in public space, to step outside their comfort zones in a way that lowers their costs of failure for doing so. And that’s what KinkForAll Denver did.

To Jennifer Wohltez, I ask: Is it really worth neglecting to cover hours upon hours of KinkForAll Denver sessions about everything from “Bikesexuality” to “Human Centered Design for Better Community Experience” to “The Physics of Sex Machines and Vibrators” because the egos of some BDSM Scene-State elites got bruised? I think that’s sensationalist reporting and it’s something, like I told you over email (published, at the end of this post), I’d hoped was beneath you.

For fuck’s sake, Jenn, you categorized your article “Fight!”? Are you really that immature? Are you really more interested in a Saskia vs. Maymay, get-ready-to-rumble-style cage match? I promise you, I’m not as interesting as the challenge of addressing embedded racism, sexism, classism, ableism, adultism, and many other kyriarchical issues inside “anti-oppression communities.”

Worse, the article you wrote wasn’t even accurate. Lazy reporting disappoints me even more than tabloid sensationalism. But, since transparency matters to me, I’m going to disentangle this ridiculousness one last time. Here goes.

Decontextualization is unethical, and petty

We’ve encountered decontextualization before. Funnily enough, it’s also a classic pattern used by sex-negative media. We know how it works—and, wow, does decontextualization ever work! We also know how to combat it: make primary sources available and accessible.

Let’s take it from the top. In the article, Jennifer writes:

[T]wo KinkForAllDenver organizers censored presentations to discourage too much BDSM content and actively sought to exclude local kinksters.

First of all, note the repeated conflation of “kinksters” and BDSM’ers—this reveals the limitations of Jennifer Wohletz’s understanding of KinkForAll, as well as “kink” more generally. Secondly, “censored” is a loaded word; it was used in precisely the same way Donna M. Hughes used “sex trafficking” in her review of the Happy Endings? documentary.

Writing that “organizers censored presentations” is also just plain false. I repeatedly asked Jeff and Isaac, the people who “staged a protest” to upload their session slides so that they could be more widely disseminated, not less. I did this not just at KFADEN itself, but then multiple times on Facebook, as well:

By the way, I *also* asked for a copy of the slideshow, from you, personally, after your session.

[…]

I asked you point blank after your session, “Can I see your slides or something?” And you said, something to the effect of “They’re around,” with no other overture to offer me any kind of access to your material.

After the slides were finally published, it was I who linked to them from the KinkForAll Denver schedule grid.

Moreover, Rebecca Crane had this to say, which was unsurprisingly not published in nor linked to from Jennifer Wohletz’s piece:

I had an extended e-mail exchange with Saskia off-list in which we discussed possible presentation topics, and I expressed *repeatedly* that I was interested in and excited about the Biofeedback workshop she’d suggested, and that I was personally looking forward to attending.

[…]

I think all this silliness about how Saskia’s presentations were “shot down” or she was “encouraged not to come” is just that: silliness. I personally invited and encouraged Saskia’s involvement repeatedly, in several different formats, including through mutual friends, directly myself via e-mail, and even trying to “raise a white flag” after all the drama between her and maymay by personally taking KFADEN fliers to a party at the RACK Room – where, incidentally, she essentially refused to so much as make eye-contact with me much less have a conversation.

So where did all this “silliness” come from? In her article, Jennifer Wohletz writes:

Mistress Saskia […] was originally planning to present on biofeedback breathing and scene identities and roles.

Here we see what I call the “confuse” tactic:

This tactic relies on an audience not to fact-check, as it includes outright lying, omitting important facts (“de-contextualizing”), and even creating false contexts. In this way, the tactic is identical to Andrew Breitbart’s famous example: take the facts, strip them of context, and present them in as emotionally charged a way as possible.

Herein lies the danger of being too complacent, of not being skeptical enough. The people presenting information will take advantage of others’ inaction, exploiting that for all it’s worth using severely biased or baseless claims.

There’s lots of chatter about a possible “biofeedback breathing” or a “scene identities and roles” session, and not a word about the one topic idea from Saskia that I (not KinkForAll Denver, but I, maymay) actually objected to due, in part, to the demonstrative rather than discursive nature of it: “Temporary body mod/art (would need volunteer bodies willing to be stapled/sutured/pierced).”

And even despite my vociferous objections, Saskia very well could have done a piercing workshop if she actually showed up, signed up for a session slot on the KinkForAll Denver schedule grid, started and finished within 20 minutes, and did not violate the venue’s rules. But Saskia needed to show up to make it happen, and I, for one, am glad that to the best of my knowledge, no one was stapled, sutured, or pierced at KFADEN. Saying that anyone “censored” anything is a petty lie.

And then there’s this:

in an attempt to “extend an olive branch” and facilitate advertisement of the KFADEN event, [maymay] and Crane and were then invited to attend a private gathering in Mistress Saskia’s dungeon under the auspices of promoting the event.

“Rebecca and Maymay came to a RACK Room event with the express intent of promoting the event by discussing it with other guests and by flyer-ing,” says Saskia.
But [maymay] showed up with a notebook and asked people questions, she continues, which he recorded and then posted on one of his personal blogs — a violation of safe space and guest privacy. “Nobody gave consent to be interviewed for a blog post,” Saskia insists.

Since linking to primary sources is a bad idea when what you are doing is decontextualizing something, it’s no surprise that the Westword article has no links at all except to other Westword articles. Fact of the matter is I’ve already addressed this elsewhere when I responded directly to Jeff on the KinkForAll mailing list:

First of all, I didn’t have a notepad, I used my own business cards and a pen to write notes to myself, mostly notes about the imagery the RACK Room featured on the walls, and also contact information for the people I spoke to when they offered me links to their websites and FetLife profiles.

I tried several times to have a conversation with you at the RACK Room and you hardly even looked up from your computer all night at Matriarchy. Part of the reason I accepted your gracious invitation to come flyer for KFADEN *was to meet with you and Saskia.* For her part, when I tried to introduce myself [to] Saskia, she barely took my hand, never made eye contact, and just kept walking by me. For your part, when I finally moved to head back to my hosts’, I approached you one last time while fetching my things in a last ditch effort to actually *have* a conversation with you.

Again, you barely acknowledged my presence, citing that it was “totally a work night” or something like that. I sympathized, stating again that I was familiar with the IT/sysadmin grind, and stating, “Well, I’ll be at KFADEN. Maybe I’ll see you there?” As I recall, it was at that point you pushed yourself away from the table, finally looked up at me, and said, “Oh, I’ll definitely be there.” I remember because it seemed odd that you would suddenly be so emphatic.

[…]

Obviously, I pissed you off on the mailing list (and I’m in no way sorry about that) but, of the two of us, I was not the one who chose to disengage first.

All of this is about me and Saskia or Jeff. This is stupid and wastes energy. Back on Facebook, Rebecca Crane made the following observation:

I’m actually quite happy with how the article came out. :) First and foremost because I think it illustrates a VERY interesting point re: my comment about “power, privilege, and influence within our local communities.”

Note that KinkForAll – Denver, which a huge diversity of communities worked on together for months, got a 22 paragraph write-up in the Westword – and yet, somehow, that write-up is largely dominated by the voice and opinion of a single person. A person who wasn’t even at the event. A person who, incidentally […] is a personal friend of the journalist who wrote this post.

This article — the only major news coverage that KFADEN received after months of work by many, many people — isn’t ABOUT KinkForAll Denver. This article is about Saskia Davies and why she didn’t go to KinkForAll Denver. I just think that’s interesting.

This behavior is typical of the BDSM Scene’s bullshit. Good people like Rebecca Crane pour their hearts and souls into making something awesome happen, and then the much larger traditional BDSM’ers peanut gallery throw verbal jabs. I have seen this time and again in every social institution I have been privy to. It happens on the extreme political right to disenfranchise us, sexually vocal people! The BDSM Scene should hold itself to a higher standard. That it doesn’t thoroughly disgusts me.

KinkForAll’s transparency is expressly intended to mitigate this inanity. That’s why I’m glad there are so many documented interactions. You don’t have to believe me. Just empower yourself to fact check.

And if you ever need a BDSM Scene-State-sponsored writer, don’t hesitate to contact Jennifer Wohletz at the Denver Westword. According to Jeff Jizz, she’s “the perfect reporter to cover this,” so she’s unquestionably an invaluable person for BDSM Scene-State yes-men to know about.

Email Conversation with Jennifer Wohletz from the Denver Westword about KinkForAll Denver

From: 	[Jennifer Wohletz] <ladyjparker79@gmail.com>
Subject: 	It's Jenn from Westword--questions for the KFADEN story
Date: 	February 25, 2012 11:27:42 PM MST
To: 	[maymay] <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>

Hello again! Thanks for speaking with me today, and I have a few follow-up questions before I post the story on Monday a.m. I’m also sending Rebecca similar questions.

The group who did the protest demonstration today and some local kinksters here in the Denver community have made allegations of censorship, exclusion and possible misappropriation of funds donated for the event, and I want to give you the opportunity to respond to those.

Thanks, and I’d appreciate it it if you could get these back to me tomorrow so I can post your side of the story in the piece.

Questions:

Here are some quotes from the Silence is Golden: A Quiet Approach to Free Speech About Sexuality presentation. Would you please verify if these quotes came from you?

1. “Traditional BDSM’ers are welcome to come and be made uncomfortable by me.”
2. “It is my expressly stated intention to make “traditionalists” uncomfortable. I enjoy it, I’m good at it, and I’m not going to pull any punches in Denver or anywhere else. My aim is to destroy every “safe place” for privledged BDSM bullshit anywhere within my reach. And yes, that includes KinkForAll.”
3. “I don’t think the scene is doing good work. I think it’s awful and I’m so fed up with it I’m almost ready to burn it down.”

  • Were local BDSMers invited to attend and/or present at KFADEN?
  • Do you have a personal issue(s) with the BDSM community?
  • It’s being alleged that you create drama in BDSM scenes in different cities, including Denver, then posy blogs about it in order to drive traffic to your websites. How do you respond to this allegation?
  • Do your personal feelings and opinions about BDSMers and the BDSM community via your personal/professional blogs make it a conflict of interest for you to be an organizer of KFA events?
  • It’s also been alleged that KFA event organizers being labeled as “un-organizers” gives you and other organizers a lack of accountability. How do you respond to that?
  • It has also been alleged that you asked for, and accepted donations to secure the KFADEN space, and after the event was subsidized by a sponsor group, the money collected was spent on t-shirts at a markup, and the extra money was pocketed by you. What is your response to this?
  • Who owns the KinkForAll store?

Thank you—I will send you a link to the story when it posts if you like.

Jennifer Wohletz
Freelance Writer
*Now with Denver Westword flavor crystals!

Subject: 	Re: It's Jenn from Westword--questions for the KFADEN story
From: 	maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>
Date: 	February 26, 2012 9:50:29 PM MST
To: 	[Jennifer Wohletz] <ladyjparker79@gmail.com>
Cc: 	Rebecca Crane <rebeccacrane@gmail.com>

Hi Jenn,

Thanks for making it out to KinkForAll Denver yesterday! I’m really glad to have gotten the opportunity to meet you. I didn’t notice if you left shortly after we spoke or not (I don’t remember seeing you later), but I hope you had a good time and got the opportunity to meet interesting people, have interesting conversations, or had an interaction that you may not have expected to have the opportunity to enjoy otherwise. :)

Please accept my apologies on the (relative) brevity of this email. I’m trying to wrap up a lot of loose ends for myself here in Denver and Boulder and, at the same time, preparing to travel to Atlanta, Georgia where I’m slated to present the opening keynote to the Atlanta Poly Weekend conference. I’m very excited about it![0]

The group who did the protest demonstration today and some local kinksters here in the Denver community have made allegations of censorship, exclusion and possible misappropriation of funds donated for the event, and I want to give you the opportunity to respond to those.

Questions:

Here are some quotes from the Silence is Golden: A Quiet Approach to Free Speech About Sexuality presentation. Would you please verify if these quotes came from you?

[…redundant quotation clipped for brevity…]

All of my correspondence with the people who I understand participated in that KinkForAll session are archived and publicly available on the KinkForAll mailing list. I can’t verify these were quotes from the session because, as you know, I was not present at that session. (I was, instead, participating in the Sex Worker Q&A session that was happening in Room A at the time.)[1][2][3] Instead, I’ll encourage you to verify that these were, in fact, quotes taken from our correspondence by running searches against our publicly accessible archives:

https://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall

It might be useful to you to read through the archives so that you can gain more information about what was said, by whom, and in what context, as I’m sure that will make for a more interesting article.

Also, I have a question for you: is it your understanding that the KinkForAll session you’re asking me about was a “protest demonstration”? My understanding is that it was a KinkForAll session. Can you tell me who, if not you, is characterizing it differently and, if so, can you tell me a bit more about why? Even better, I’d love to hear about that in their own words, perhaps even via an email on the KinkForAll mailing list! :)

Please consider yourself and everyone else, invited to air their concerns on the KinkForAll mailing list or to discuss whatever they’d like related to allegations made against KinkForAll (or me in relation to KinkForAll) there. The list is open access; anyone can join by sending an email to “kinkforall+subscribe@googlegroups.com.”[4] This is an invitation I’ve extended to other individuals who have been angered or upset in relation to previous KinkForAll events. You may be interested in those, too. If so, feel free to follow up on that history, as well; all of that is, as you might have guessed by now, publicly available.[5]

It’s also been alleged that KFA event organizers being labeled as “un-organizers” gives you and other organizers a lack of accountability. How do you respond to that?

I’ve addressed this concern numerous times in the past. You might be interested in taking a read through my public response to concerns raised regarding “unstructured” events and how the transparent nature of KinkForAll’s “unorganizing” model increases individuals’ accountability during the process, rather than decreasing it:

http://maybemaimed.com/2010/03/27/addressing-donna-m-hughes-and-margaret-brooks-concerns-over-kinkforall-unconferences/

I hope this helps!

It has also been alleged that you asked for, and accepted donations to secure the KFADEN space, and after the event was subsidized by a sponsor group, the money collected was spent on t-shirts at a markup, and the extra money was pocketed by you. What is your response to this?

Again, why not just reference the source?

https://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall/browse_thread/thread/ebed1fb6ddd368a2#msg_ad934dcf407769d4
https://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall/browse_thread/thread/3384fc7f07c26d34

I’m particularly disappointed to hear that there is a rumor of KinkForAll shirts ever having “a markup.” That’s just not true. Moreover, Rebecca and I were very, very careful to make sure that the zero-profit/no-markup pricing was clear.[6]

Who owns the KinkForAll store?

Some company called Printfection, Inc. does. :) Again, why not take a look at the KinkForAll store to get this information:

1) Load http://store.kinkforall.org
2) Read the bottom: “This service is powered by Printfection.com.”
3) Compare the prices listed on all KinkForAll merchandise to the base prices listed at Printfection’s public pricing guide:
http://www.printfection.com/customer/custom.php?tab=3
4) See that no markup exists. ;)

  • Were local BDSMers invited to attend and/or present at KFADEN?
  • Do you have a personal issue(s) with the BDSM community?
  • It’s being alleged that you create drama in BDSM scenes in different cities, including Denver, then posy blogs about it in order to drive traffic to your websites. How do you respond to this allegation?
  • Do your personal feelings and opinions about BDSMers and the BDSM community via your personal/professional blogs make it a conflict of interest for you to be an organizer of KFA events?

Again, I apologize for not being able to link you to *all* the threads on the mailing list where this has already been discussed, but I encourage you to follow your information to its source. :) My personal opinions are no more a secret to any interested reader than the KinkForAll mailing list archives are. You’re more than welcome to peruse any of my published critiques of the BDSM Scene as you wish.[7][8][9][10]

That said, I honestly don’t understand why you’re asking so many questions about me and not, y’know, the awesome sessions that happened at KinkForAll. Did you get to see, for instance, “Bikesexuality: Bike Smut & Self-Sufficient Transportation Meets Sexual and Physical Health”? How about “Physics of Sex Machines and Vibrators”? If you just didn’t get a chance, today I’ve been working to make them available online for free[11][12] so consider watching them through! :) When the remainder are posted online by whoever recorded those sessions, you’ll be able to access them from the KinkForAll Denver Schedule archive page:

http://wiki.KinkForAll.org/KinkForAllDenverSchedule

I’d feel very sad if these and other innovative presentations at KinkForAll Denver were downplayed in your article in favor of headlining a personal disagreement between KFADEN participants. If you’d like to contact other participants, including the ones who lead sessions, many of them have left their contact information on the KinkForAll Denver sign-up page.[13] You are, of course, empowered to ask them of their experience as well, and I hope you do. :)

Cheers,
-maymay
Blog: http://maybemaimed.com
Talk show: http://KinkOnTap.com
Community: http://KinkForAll.org

EXTERNAL REFERENCES:

[0] http://atlantapolyweekend.com/2012-atlanta-poly-weekend-presenters
[1] https://twitter.com/maymaym/status/173476240097951746
[2] https://twitter.com/maymaym/status/173475247381688321
[3] https://twitter.com/maymaym/status/173474921777872897
[4] http://wiki.KinkForAll.org/UsingTheKinkForAllMailingList
[5] https://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall/browse_thread/thread/4020d397e88241ed
[6] https://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall/browse_thread/thread/3384fc7f07c26d34#msg_a2c70a9569a18a3e
[7] http://malesubmissionart.com/post/5498352136/an-opulently-dressed-man-in-greek-inspired
[8] http://days.maybemaimed.com/post/16036372049/the-bdsm-scenes-whiteness-is-classism-at-work
[9] http://maybemaimed.com/2011/12/04/on-being-bondage-furniture/
[10] http://maybemaimed.com/2011/07/16/on-letting-the-world-burn/
[11] https://twitter.com/maymaym/status/173927327326154752
[12] https://twitter.com/maymaym/status/173855907753631744
[13] http://wiki.KinkForAll.org/KinkForAllDenver

As it turns out, Saskia was spreading rumors about my “misappropriation of funds.” On FetLife, she wrote:

Maymay decided to get the tshirts through a company that let’s the purchaser set the price over the printing costs, then pocket the discrepancy. So maymay profited personally.

Which, of course, is just an outright lie.

From: 	[Jennifer Wohletz] <ladyjparker79@gmail.com>
Subject: 	Re: It's Jenn from Westword--questions for the KFADEN story
Date: 	March 1, 2012 10:56:13 AM MST
To: 	maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>

Thank you for speaking with me for the story, and here’s a link to it on the Westword site: http://blogs.westword.com/showandtell/2012/03/sex_lies_and_a_slideshow_drama_at_the_kinkforalldenver_conference.php

From: 	maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>
Subject: 	Re: It's Jenn from Westword--questions for the KFADEN story
Date: 	March 1, 2012 1:22:19 PM MST
To: 	[Jennifer Wohletz] <ladyjparker79@gmail.com>

On Mar 1, 2012, at 10:56 AM, [Jennifer Wohletz] wrote:

Thank you for speaking with me for the story, and here’s a link to it on the Westword site: http://blogs.westword.com/showandtell/2012/03/sex_lies_and_a_slideshow_drama_at_the_kinkforalldenver_conference.php

Hi Jenn,

Thanks for sending me the link to your piece!

I’d like to ask you to please revise your use of my legal name to simply “maymay.” If I’m not mistaken, I have never introduced myself to you as [my legal name] nor have I sent you any written material in which my legal name was present. I am maymay. [My legal name] is what the legal system wants to call me. Maymay is what I want you to call me.

I trust you understand the difference between such things as, for example, “Jenn” and “Jane.”

Thank you for participating in KinkForAll Denver. :)

Cheers,
-maymay
Blog: http://maybemaimed.com
Talk show: http://KinkOnTap.com
Community: http://KinkForAll.org

UPDATE: Some more emails:

From: 	[Jennifer Wohletz] <ladyjparker79@gmail.com>
Subject: 	Re: It's Jenn from Westword--questions for the KFADEN story
Date: 	March 2, 2012 2:55:00 PM MST
To: 	maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>

Hi again!

I forwarded your last message to my editor, we discussed it, and he is making the changes you’ve requested. It seems fair and reasonable to me that you should be able to identify yourself as you choose, as the other subjects did.

I would like to request that you remove the link on your website to my FetLife profile–feel free to link anything else of mine or about me you like; I don’t mind, but my FL profile has others’ information on it who aren’t “out” and I’d like their privacy protected.

Thanks, Jenn

From: 	maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>
Subject: 	Re: It's Jenn from Westword--questions for the KFADEN story
Date: 	March 2, 2012 5:30:11 PM MST
To: 	[Jennifer Wohletz] <ladyjparker79@gmail.com>

No problem, Jenn. First, publish the comment I left on your article at the Westword via Disqus that has yet to be approved.[0] Don’t forget to check the spam filter! ;) *Then* I’ll edit my post.

Cheers,
-maymay
Blog: http://maybemaimed.com
Talk show: http://KinkOnTap.com
Community: http://KinkForAll.org

[0] http://maybemaimed.com/2012/03/02/help-me-check-bdsms-privilege-at-the-next-kinkforall-unconference/#comment-303561

UPDATE: Even more emails. These are important:

From: 	[Jennifer Wohletz] <ladyjparker79@gmail.com>
Subject: 	Re: It's Jenn from Westword--questions for the KFADEN story
Date: 	March 4, 2012 1:14:31 AM MST
To: 	maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>

Hi!

The changes were made to the story, but with regard to the Disqus comments–try posting your comment again in case something didn’t work the first time, and if you still aren’t seeing your comment posted let me know and I’ll give you our web editor’s contact info.

Unfortunately I don’t have admin access to, or admin authority over the web comments–that’s a different department than the one I work for–but I’ll be happy to put you in touch with them.

Jenn 

From: 	maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>
Subject: 	Re: It's Jenn from Westword--questions for the KFADEN story
Date: 	March 4, 2012 3:17:48 PM MST
To: 	[Jennifer Wohletz] <ladyjparker79@gmail.com>

Hi Jenn,

You can be a smart, powerful, resilient, resourceful human being. I trust you can figure out how to communicate with whatever departments and other people you need to ensure comments on your stories are published. And once you figure that out, you will have gained ability you seem to currently lack.

I therefore encourage you to empower yourself to take whatever authority you need to, regardless of your job description or assigned role within the Westword, to effect the outcome you want to see.

Thank you again for your participation in KinkForAll Denver. When I see the comment I left on your article published, I’ll edit my post as you requested. :) You may want to contact me again to let me know when the comment is published, as I won’t be checking back on the article’s webpage myself.

Cheers,
-maymay
Blog: http://maybemaimed.com
Talk show: http://KinkOnTap.com
Community: http://KinkForAll.org

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Invisibility versus Illegibility: KinkForAll shows how “kink” is everything you didn’t know it can be

23 Feb 2012 at 17:40

maymay

Kink events, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex

1 Comment

KinkForAll Denver is a free and open to the public "unconference" about sex, gender, relationships, and the ways these things affect our lives.

Update: KinkForAll Denver was great, and having fallen ill, I am far too exhausted to say anymore more than that. Keep an eye on the blogosphere’s KFADEN tagspace for others’ opinions. :)

Update: Although there was some media coverage about KinkForAll Denver, most coverage was unfortunately petty. Nevertheless, I’m proud to have taken part in helping to create another “self-empowerment training area.”

This Saturday, February 25th, I’ll have the privilege of participating in KinkForAll Denver, an open-to-the-public “unconference” whose theme is sex and relationships education—with a twist.

Rather than invite “experts” to give lectures to a passive audience, KinkForAll Denver follows in the footsteps of previous KinkForAll events by treating everyone as an expert, encouraging them to share what they know in a highly social, peer-to-peer learning environment. “What excites me most about KinkForAll is the idea that everyone has valuable skills and ideas to share. We’re all experts on our own experiences,” said Rebecca Crane, one of a dedicated group of sex and relationships advocates helping to “unorganize” the KinkForAll Denver event.

Much of the world we live in is uncomfortable with and hostile toward education about intimacy, making many people fearful of openly discussing “taboos.” Sexual stigmas sustain an aristocratic stranglehold on information, privileging credentialed gatekeepers over the only true expert on your own desires: you! One reason speaking freely about sex, gender, and relationships is useful is the way doing so can make us aware of the limitations of our knowledge. KinkForAll’s participatory format challenges the notion that only the gatekeepers can talk about taboo topics; feeling nervous, uninformed, or inexperienced doesn’t mean you have nothing valuable to share.

Maintaining a stranglehold on sexual information also makes it easy to pervert sexual relationships into a tool for controlling people. You can see examples of this in practically every TV commercial, billboard, and sphere of advertising. The commercialization of sex—along with its counterpoint, the over-sexualization of commerce—betrays an uncomfortable paradox: even though sex and relationships are vitally important to us, we don’t know enough about them to understand how these things affect our lives. Is it any wonder, then, that many people are often scared of discussing sexual things publicly, honestly, and freely?

Of course, one of the main causes for this fear is lack of knowledge. The fact is, we don’t know a lot about intimacy, its diverse formulations, or the interplay and distinctions between the many kinds that exist. Oh sure, we say we do, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize when people overwhelmingly agree they’re getting sent “mixed messages” regarding sex, gender, and relationships, something’s unclear.

This isn’t just a theoretical frustration, either. When we don’t know that we don’t know something, we can’t discover useful, safe, and ethical ways to engage with or to learn more about it! This behavioral catalyst is called “illegibility,” and while the term is usually applied to domains of industry and public policy, it also applies to queer theory and identity politics. In his review of Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott, Venkatesh Rao writes, “States and large organizations exhibit this pattern of behavior most dramatically, but individuals frequently exhibit it in their private lives as well.”

Ironically, part of the difficulty in understanding illegibility is that it bears a striking resemblance to, yet a subtle difference from, a more familiar behavioral catalyst: invisibility. Both are ways one might respond to something one doesn’t understand. When something is invisible, one simply doesn’t register its presence. On the other hand, when something is illegible, one misinterprets it as something it is not.

Consider the difficulties in talking about sex. Before you talk about sex, you have to define your terms. Is sex “penetrative sexual intercourse”? If that’s true, is phone sex not sex? Is sex “two or more people, one or more orgasms”? If that’s true, what should we call penetrative sexual intercourse where an orgasm isn’t experienced by anyone? Surely no one would say such an act “doesn’t count” as sex, right? So, if it’s this hard to clarify “sex,” is it any wonder trying to communicate nuances of a deeply-held, personal fantasy is so much harder?

That difficulty is due to illegibility; you might be able to say “I fantasize about being spanked” and, since the idea that one might enjoy being spanked is common knowledge, you can make your fantasy visible to your partner. But, for many people, “being spanked” is simply a communicative label that doesn’t actually convey (i.e., doesn’t make legible) the emotional tenor or erotic context of the fantasy. While I suspect everyone experiences feeling illegible at one point or another, few people can recognize things that are illegible to themselves. That’s what not knowing what you don’t know means.

In many ways, KinkForAll (“KFA”) faces illegibility problems:

Maymay and Sara Eileen organized the first KFA in New York in 2009, I believe, and it has happened in several other cities around the US since. It’s an awesome event with an interesting branding problem: it is very hard, it turns out, to be an event with the word “kink” in your title, and not be about BDSM. I say this because I have been confused by this since 2009 despite maymay’s frequent and patient explanations, and from the chatter on the email list and the questions I get when I talk about KFA, I know I’m not alone.

The structural design of KinkForAll unconferences were an intentional, radical departure from earlier, legible sex education initiatives. In James C. Scott’s words, “[T]he most illegible educational system would be completely informal, nonstandardized instruction determined entirely by local mutuality.” Although illegibility produces predictable (and frustrating) misunderstandings, that’s how KinkForAll was designed to work. As KinkForAll Denver unorganizer Rebecca Crane said, “the way to make something more legible is [to] talk about it in great detail a lot[, w]hich is different from the way you make invisible things visible: By talking about them loudly.”

One way to spot illegibility is to look for questions that make little sense. By way of example, a reporter recently asked the KinkForAll Denver unorganizers, “Do you feel that Denver is a kink-friendly city?” and “How do you respond to conservatives who feel that the kink lifestyle is morally wrong and on par with insanity?” These questions revealed the limits of what the reporter knows about “kink.” (And now that the reporter’s article is published, take a look at the images chosen to supplement the piece.)

I have long hoped KinkForAll would show people that the word “kink” is too often too narrowly defined. Neither kink nor sex is merely about who did what to whom, as though we were playing a game of Clue. Rather, these terms describe complex experiences, regardless of whether you identify as “kinky” or “vanilla.”

To some people, “kink” means “sex with a twist.” To others, it means a specific subset of sexuality subcultures, such as leather or swinging. And therein lies the problem: kink, like sex, is a term with no consensus. Everyone uses it, but without being on the same page about what it means. This causes confusion, misunderstanding, and—in worse cases—outright discrimination.

A “slut” is just someone who has more sexual partners than you. Likewise, someone who’s “kinky” is simply someone whose intimate desires seem weirder than yours. So unless the reporter thinks of Denver as a city where everyone wants the same exact thing in their relationships—and I know for a fact that’s false—then Denver has to be a kink-friendly city, by definition!

I want KinkForAll Denver to be a place, like a friendly coffee shop, where people who don’t know one another can meet and discover they’re both passionate about the same things. This makes people visible to one another. And I want KinkForAll Denver to be a place where someone who’s been afraid of public speaking moves to the front of the room and gives a presentation because it’s only going to be for 20 minutes and the person before them seemed a little nervous anyway, so why not try? This teaches people how to make themselves visible to one another. And I also want KinkForAll Denver to be a place where someone, like that reporter, who thinks of “kink” as a “lifestyle” realized that, actually, it’s just an idea—making certain values of “kink” that were illegible, legible.

This gets personal. Being invisible hurts like hell. Meanwhile, being illegible precludes the possibility of being invisible. I think it’s important to grieve for hurts caused by illegibility, as well as ones caused by invisibility. It’s important because knowing how to do that is a prerequisite to treating others compassionately.

Most of all, I want KinkForAll Denver to be a place where participants learn that they don’t need permission to talk about whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want—whether that be at the next KinkForAll unconference, at their office, at their church, or anywhere. Because my real goal for KinkForAll isn’t even about sex. It’s about giving each of us the power we need to make our lives worth living.

And that starts with teaching people how to see what’s invisible, and how to read what’s illegible.

Be part of KinkForAll Denver at the Tivoli Student Union on Auraria Campus in Denver, CO. You can sign up to participate on the KinkForAll Denver homepage, Facebook, FetLife, TwtVite, Upcoming, or Plancast pages. Learn more about KinkForAll at http://KinkForAll.org, our Frequently Asked Questions page, or our public mailing list. Our wiki also has more information regarding what to expect and how to participate.

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Suddenly the world seems such a perfect place: Technomaddery, Cyberbusking, and More

01 Jan 2012 at 01:29

maymay

Personal experience, Vanilla life

6 Comments

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

—Ray Bradbury

They say 2012 is the year of armageddon? Let's bring on the ruckus, I say!

Earlier today, December 31st, 2011, I filed my thirty-day notice of intent to vacate my San Francisco apartment.

On the one hand, I simply can’t financially afford my little studio in the Tenderloin any longer. No, I don’t have another apartment lined up, and no, I don’t intend to find one. Instead, I’m about to leap off this cliff and grow my wings on the way down. Yes, I’m scared. And, yes, I’ll be okay.

On the other hand, looking back on it all now, leaving not just San Francisco but the very notion of a permanent address behind seems an inevitable path. Early in 2009, I wrote about what kind of man I am. I had few answers, and many questions:

[A]gain, I ask myself, who am I? What is my sexual submissiveness without the dominant presence that revived it when I had given it up those four long years ago? What is my career when I have achieved, for me, an unprecedented level of recognition after 8 long years of being in the workforce? What is my contribution to my own future, and to people like me who are still young children today?

What kind of man am I if so much of the world I live in refuses to see manliness in what I am? Because today, having considered the possibility that I was perhaps a woman at earlier stages of my life, it turns out I am a man. And I am going to make the world know it is good to be the kind of man I am.

Then, in January of 2010, I wrote about what kind of world I wanted to live in. Again, I had few answers, and many questions:

Many of our current societal systems are unsustainable. We all know it. We’ve all felt the effects.

Global financial crisis. Depreciation of college degrees. Ecological disasters. Massive civil unrest resulting in groups of unhappy, violent people (“terrorists”). If we as the human race are going to survive the century, we simply have to change the rules of this game. And that starts with normal people like you and me committing to doing what we want to do, not what we were told we have to do. I wasn’t comfortable playing by the rules of the so-called well-schooled majority, and I’m no longer comfortable playing by the rules of this economy. I now aim to change it.

And I’m not willing to merely survive, because I demand excellence and happiness. I demand it of myself, and so I demand it of you.

[…]

I believe there is more value in doing, being, and getting what I want than in sacrificing it. I believe that there is more richness in the world than can be measured with all the world’s riches.

Doing good work is priceless not because its execution is necessarily of superb quality, but because its value can only be determined by the people who find it useful to them. But I can’t magically transport us out of the economic jail of living paycheck-to-paycheck that so many of us are in. It’s going to take many intermediate steps to get us from here to a place where the value that people create by doing what they love is also what sustains us.

And I have only the vaguest of idealistic dreams for how I’m going to help get us there. But I do have those dreams, and I can’t ignore them.

And so, I began 2011 in something of a haze, “trapped in a world between worlds.”

Holidays or arbitrary markers like a “new year” are difficult times for me. Either they seem an excuse for thoughtless hedonism—parties without purpose, drinks without delight, gifts without generosity, kisses without chemistry—or they are permeated with an intolerable veneer of culturally-imposed “togetherness” that leaves too many out in the cold, often literally. And yet….

And yet, this year has been remarkable. I was angry—oh, so angry—and frustrated that I could not explain exactly why. But, slowly, that began to change. I was sad, and I felt isolated by a system that had conditioned me to feel alone. But that, too, slowly began to change.

I adopted the designation “Social Justice Technologist” without having any real idea of what that means. But in talking to others about it, I refined my own understanding. Yes, I am interested in using telecommunications technologies to improve the world, but I no longer define “technology” so narrowly.

A social justice technologist is someone who works to improve the technology—the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes—of social justice movements themselves. “The technology of social justice” is as social as it is machined; its componentry includes both carbon and silicon. How do people interface with themselves and with their cultures? With other cultures? What is the DNA, the vital code, of a human relationship? Can the conditions necessary to nurture empathic, compassionate communications between human beings and their natural environment be replicated, and if so, how? How do “edge cases,” one-offs, weirdos, become (sub)cultures?

What is the personal genesis of self-empowerment? Are there invariable, atomic elements common among these experiences? If so, what is the most effective way to infuse the largest number of people with these positive experiences in a way that successfully engenders autonomous power for each given individual? Is there a single, critical pressure point on which we as a community can converge to instigate the crumbling of sex-negativity and the rise of an authentically sex-positive worldwide social order? If so, I want to find that pressure point, that crack in the hegemony, and direct every single ounce of strength I have there until I have no life force left.

The world will follow wherever we lead it—kicking and screaming if they must. I promise you that. And that’s when the impossible magnitude of what I was thinking about hit me like a ton of bricks: I can not do this alone.

Thankfully, somewhere in the midst of all this theorizing, all this doing and failing and doing again, something magical happened: I began to understand how to connect with you. One piece, one memory, one story at a time. Bit by digital bit, I reconstituted myself in a form both evanescent yet permanent enough to squeeze sufficiently through the static walls surrounding us and feel the spark of possibility—a mental liberation more akin to psychological rebellion than physical revolution, but an imaginative seed nonetheless. I embraced the fortune of my privileges and the plight of my oppressions.

Most importantly, and most recently, I have learned to refuse the repressions of either of these things. And having that knowledge is such great power.

And that brings me to today, the start of 2012. What could a submissive man do with autonomous power? What ought anyone do with it? Here’s an idea:

[L]et's bomb the factory
that makes all the wannabes.
Let's burst all the bubbles
that brainwash the masses.

And so, while many others are out on this New Year’s Eve, I’m at home taking stock not only of the past year, but also of all the stuff I have. That coffee table I never used, those folding chairs still folded in the corner, the extra pair of linens I never needed to wash because I never used them. Those hand towels. The desk at which I’m sitting and wrote so much. My bed. That pile of electronics in the corner.

It’s all just stuff I don’t need, distractions I can’t afford, things I hardly used. The only reason I have them is because I was afraid of not having them, because I was made to believe I was supposed to have an apartment, with stuff, purchased using money from a job I don’t like to make me feel better about having that job I never really even fucking wanted. And now, I’m not so afraid of that anymore.

So I’m giving it all away. On January 6th, 2012, I’m inviting you to show up at my door, look around my apartment, find something you like, tell me you want it, and if it’s not already been spoken for, it’s yours. Seriously. Quoting from the event I put on Facebook:

Here’s the deal: I have a lot of stuff. […] There’s no way I can carry it all while I travel. So before I sell most of it, I want to give my personal community (that’s you!) first dibs on taking it all FOR FREE.

All I ask is that if you take, say, a frying pan, next time I’m in your neck of the woods, please make me an omelette on it. :) If you take my squash racquet, treat me to a game of squash next time I’m in town. You get the drill.

After that? I’m off to the East coast again. And, if you haven’t been reading my blog in an RSS reader, you might have noticed my travel itinerary is now visible on my sidebar, along with my current whereabouts. This information, along with details regarding my basic needs like food and shelter, is also on my new “Cyberbusking” page. And if you are reading my blog in an RSS reader, you’ll see a note at the bottom of all my entries reminding you that I’m jumping off this cliff and trying to grow my wings on my way down.

I’ll need help, and I’m still learning how to ask for it; to date, your retweets, reblogs, and the other ways you have engaged with me through this telepathic non-magic of the Internet has been profound, and profoundly appreciated. Thank you. I also want to keep helping others—and I think I can. So in addition to the above, I’ve added a contact form at the bottom of my “Seminars” page where you can tell me more about you and what you’re hoping we can make happen together. Because, as the song goes:

As far as I can tell,
it doesn't matter who you are,
if you can believe there's something worth fighting for.
The colour of an eye,
the glory of a sudden view,
the baby in your arms,
the smile he always shoots at you.

Believing in nothing
makes life so boring,
so let's pray for something
to feel good in the morning.

[…]

So live for tomorrow,
and do what you have to.

My tomorrow is also a callback to my past. After the East coast, and after I complete the legal transition out of my apartment in January, I’m planning to travel to Denver, where an amazingly talented core set of unorganizers have laid the groundwork for KinkForAll Denver, and I’m going to support them however I can. After that, I’ll be presenting at Atlanta Poly Weekend 2012, and then—if I get some help traveling from Atlanta back to Washington, DC—I’ll see about participating in this year’s MOMENTUM Con.

But, really, who knows what the future holds? I don’t.

As for right now, as the revelry of New Year’s Day 2012 becomes louder with each passing tick-tock of the clock, I sit here, preparing myself to say goodbye to the stuff in the walls I once called my house. Truth is, that’s all San Francisco was; a house—never a home.

Maybe I never had a home. Or maybe I ought not have defined “home” so narrowly.

Suddenly the world seems such a perfect place.
Suddenly it moves with such a perfect grace.
Suddenly my life doesn't seem such a waste.

[…]

Come what may.

Save one thing: “the revolution” isn’t “coming.” It’s here, now. Forget New Year’s “resolutions,” reject anything and everything that doesn’t feel right to you; this is a chance of a lifetime. For our own sakes, let’s take it!

And since this is my story, if there’s one thing I hope to learn from this opportunity above all others, I want it to be how to love and be loved in return.

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On Being Bondage Furniture

04 Dec 2011 at 16:09

maymay

Bitter and jealous, Emotions, Personal experience, Personal history, Politics of sex

25 Comments

I don’t know what it’s like to be bound to most bondage furniture. But I do know what it’s like to be bondage furniture.

I was reminded of this when I showed up as a volunteer for Mark’s Dungeon Crew, part of the group who had offered to help set up the Portland Leather Alliance’s post-Thanksgiving Play Party at the TA Events Center. I’d volunteered in exchange for free entry to the $20 per person party that evening, but when I got to the Events Center and stood at its doors as the big U-Haul with all the bondage furniture backed up towards us, I was overcome with an active disinclination to help.

This wasn’t laziness or freeloading; I didn’t just not want to help, I actively wanted to not help. The feeling came over me in a wave and I was briefly confused. I stood at the doorway to the party space, silent, motionless, with my hands in my pockets.

“Do you want to not help because you’re not sure if you’ll have a good time at the party?” Mish, who I’d convinced to come with me and with whom I was ostensibly volunteering for free entry, asked me after I found some awkward words for my feelings.

“No….” I said it softly, and slowly, thinking. My mouth had trouble forming the word. I felt less like I was answering her question and more like I was trying the answer on for size. “No,” I said again after a moment, more self-assured this time, for now I knew why that was not the answer.

“This needs two people,” the man unloading the U-Haul called out. He pushed a padded bondage chair toward the edge of the truck. Several volunteers appeared near him. They lifted the chair a few inches off the ground and began moving it towards the party space.

The chair was facing me head-on. I stared back at it, and that’s when I saw her. She was naked, and ugly. Her flesh was molting like a sick bird’s feathers and her bony face and hollow cheeks made her whole head resemble a skull. Her eyes were large and what thin layer of skin was stretched across her jaw curled into a mean smile. Her legs and arms were bound to the heavy wooden frame of the chair the volunteers were carrying and as they moved it into the play space the ghost turned her head, locking her eyes on mine.

Your skin makes me cry.
You float like a feather
in a beautiful world.
I wish I was special.
You’re so fucking special.

But I’m a creep,
I’m a weirdo.
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here.

“No way I’m helping,” I said aloud to myself. I turned my back and walked to the street corner without ever saying goodbye to anyone on the PLA dungeon crew.

Most submissive men hate themselves. That makes it easy for us to hate other people. That also makes it easy for other people to hate us. The BDSM Scene wouldn’t have it any other way; The Scene-State’s corrupt plutocrats have too much riding on it.

I hated myself for a long time because I want to be sexually submissive and yet I was unable to access a relationship that felt good to me. I didn’t hate myself because I wanted to be sexually submissive, I hated myself because I felt incapable of being attractive and I felt incapable of being attractive because I wanted to be sexually submissive; no one wants a submissive man.

The hatred didn’t start that way. It started as hope. I used to keep a coil of rope beneath my pillow, and I would wrap it around my wrists to comfort myself at night. I hoped that one day someone who loved me would sleep next to me, our naked skin keeping one another warm, the weight of their arms on the sides of my exposed chest as my own arms were kept above my head by the ropes.

When I first joined the BDSM Scene in 2002, I naïvely believed people there gave a shit about me. By the time my then-partner, Cookie, had burned through two relationships, I was still coiling rope under my pillow hoping I could be sexy like she was. I saw Cookie on a trailer for Kink, Inc.’s Wired Pussy porn site before I ever really played.

That’s when the hope dissipated, never to return. In that moment of invasive surprise at unexpectedly seeing my ex-partner show up on my screen as I browsed for porn, all the hope I had mutated into confusion: Why doesn’t anyone want to play with me the way I really want? Why am I not attractive? What am I doing wrong? What’s wrong with me?

Years pass.

It was getting late, but neither Eileen nor I were tired. We cast about the group, conducting an informal poll of who wanted to continue bar-hopping. The Professor was up for more, and so was C, so we said goodbye to the others as the four of us headed to the bars near St. Mark’s Place in New York City. It was an area where The Professor said he knew where to find the cheap drinks.

The Professor was a (straight) dominant man who, despite his age and ingrained ignorances, was far cooler than most of us young BDSM’ers who hung out at Conversio Virium in 2007. C was a college student, and a sex worker—a self-identified switch, a fetish model who semi-regularly bottomed for various Kink, Inc. sites, and a pro-domme. Eileen—my live-in partner, love of my life—was a dominant woman. And, well, you all know I’m a submissive man.

The four of us drank, talked, and eventually headed home to mine and Eileen’s apartment. The conversation had become flirty at the last few bars, implicitly sexual on the ride home, and explicitly so back at the apartment. I fetched us all more to drink. I remember returning to find C making out with Eileen. It wasn’t much longer before C’s clothes were on the floor. Eileen held C’s hands behind her back as they kissed, The Professor fondled C’s thighs and legs and cunt, and I stood back, smiling awkwardly and feeling very out of place in my own bedroom.

“Do you want to put an ice cube in her pussy?” The Professor asked me, taking one out of his drink and handing it to me.

I thought maybe he was being generous, trying to include me in the play scene that had “just happened.” It wasn’t just a question, it was an invitation. But it was an invitation to top. I knew how to say “no, I don’t want to put an ice cube in her pussy,” but I didn’t know how to say, “I’d rather you tie me up and put the ice cube in my ass.”

So I said nothing and slipped the ice cube I’d been handed past C’s vulva anyway. I hoped I’d feel some kind of erotic charge, but as C reacted to the cold with lustful gyrations and her perfect, practiced, pornonormative moan, I just felt worse. It was as though I was now out of place in my own skin, not just my own bedroom. The wrongness of what was happening right in front of my eyes, the stereotype that the love of my life was embracing, the offensive cliché I had so casually let enter my home, and then my bedroom, and then my bed, had now snuck its way into me. I was no longer an observer; I was a participant in something I actively wanted no part of.

The play intensified. They moved to the living room so C could feel the single-tail whip. My whip. The one that had been gifted to me for my birthday the prior year. There were no good places to throw it in our apartment so The Professor held C against his body, tits facing Eileen, near the middle of the room. Eileen ranged herself to the four-and-a-half-foot single tail. I watched it all, paralyzed, literally voiceless, like it was a train wreck in slow motion.

Bright red stripes appeared on C’s breasts and torso as Eileen singletailed her. C twisted in The Professor’s grip, lifting her legs. “Stay still,” the co-tops said several times, before finally concurring, “We need to hold her ankles in place.”

That’s when I did the most shameful thing: I prostrated myself on the floor, face down on the wood, laying myself between Eileen and C, under the range of the single-tail whip. I held onto C’s ankles with my fists and kept them in place. Eileen began to throw the whip again. Every time she did, I heard C yelp.

Sometimes, when Eileen threw a vertical strike, the follow through would land weakly across my back. It was nothing like actually being hit with the thing, nothing of consequence. But I remember wishing for it to continue, pining for just one thing: more—play with me more. There I was, a ridiculous fool, splaying myself out on the floor, doing my best imitation of bondage furniture, and feeling all but grateful for accidental swishes of single tail strikes. Strikes that weren’t even meant for me!

She wasn’t even aiming for me.

I felt so stupid. I felt so used. I felt so bad. I just wanted so much to be played with the way they were playing with C. In the moment when what I had seen in so much porn on my computer was actually happening in my own home, I was “counting my blessings,” hungrily lapping up whatever regurgitated bits of eroticism fell from the feast above me like the forgotten creep I’d become, when I should have at least said, “No way I’m helping,” turned my back, and walked away.

Later, Eileen would praise me as being “so good and helpful” during the scene, and a painful pang would explode in the middle of my chest, the emotional puncture wound in my heart draining it of blood. It would be all I could do to feign another smile.

When you were here before,
Couldn’t look you in the eye.
You’re just like an angel.

[…]

I don’t care if it hurts.
I want to have control.
I want a perfect body.
I want a perfect soul.
I want you to notice when I’m not around.
You’re so fucking special.
I wish I was special.

[…]

Whatever makes you happy.
Whatever you want.
You’re so fucking special.
I wish I was special.

But I’m a creep,
I’m a weirdo.
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here.
I don’t belong here….

—“Creep“

I had failed by not speaking up. I hated that I participated, and then I started hating myself for participating. And then I hated Eileen, C, and The Professor for being so ignorant of the societal pressure that had built up against the thing I wanted; for not knowing how long I’d kept a rope coiled under my pillow; for making me sacrifice my wants for their orgasms—again.

My hate became righteous anger. A few days later, I wrote this:

A lot of things are wrong and were never right; these things have hurt me from the first moment I interacted even remotely sexually with another person, but they are especially painful right now because of a few personal experiences that I’d much rather not go into on such a public forum. I mention that now to tell you, dearest reader, that these things are not solely the belligerent words of an angsty youth. These things do happen. They happen all the time.

[…]

I wanted to write about how submissive men will pretty much always, without fail, lose a race for sexual satisfaction out of any gender/sex/orientation combination you can come up with. Always. I’ve had a sex life that any submissive man you point at would kill to have, yet stick me in a room with other orientations and I’m still the first one sidelined, the last one standing by the fruit punch and chips, so to speak. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before, and it’s certainly going to happen again.

[…]

I’m way too angry […] to make any kind of coherent sense. So like I said, move along, keep channel surfing. There’s nothing to see here that you haven’t seen a million times before.

I used to have hope because I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to expect exclusion, to predict ostracization. Then it happened with such disturbing regularity that I became unable to imagine what it would be like not to expect exclusion, what it would be like not to be pining for that unattainable thing forever barricaded on the other side of societal pressures: more—play with me more—PLEASE. And it doesn’t just happen out there, in the world outside my bedroom, but in here, at the core of my relationships, during all of my sex: every time one of my well-meaning partners, in their lust, whispers “please fuck me” in my ear.

It didn’t take long for the calm horror to set in, the realization that I’m broken, and—worse—that everyone I ever love is going to suffer this pain because unless I see them empathize with this misery, I could never feel seen enough to love them.

I tried to maintain the pretense of friendship with The Professor and with C, but I couldn’t. Every innocent remark about playing that night in my apartment punctured my heart all over again. I smiled back at them, and they never seemed to suspect anything amiss. Over time, remarks about that night faded along with their memory of it, but by then their mere proximity—C’s beauty and the marks she loved showing off, The Professor’s suave flirting and his wild stories of the submissive women he was dating—were intolerable because my heart never healed. I started avoiding them at parties, declining invitations to events to which they had expressed an interest in attending. I don’t hate them, but I don’t miss them.

Earlier this year, Cookie left me a voicemail. She said she was writing a memoir of her coming out to the BDSM Scene, a story that is intricately entangled with my own story of the same, since her initial exposure not just to the BDSM Scene but to BDSM itself was through me. I told her I had no interest in revisiting the portions of my life with her in it and that she should not contact me unless I chose to contact her again, and good luck on her memoir.

These are some of the earliest people whose stories in my life end with, “And now we don’t talk to each other anymore.”

Nevertheless, sometimes I see their faces when I least want to; Cookie’s, C’s, countless other women I’d seen bottom, their partners’, the privileged shits, like Cookie’s dom, who thinks I’m “like an annoying five year old” asking too many questions. They were there, all of them, a composite in ghoulish form with that sick, molting flesh and that mean smile on the bondage chair that the PLA Dungeon Crew were moving in front of me: “Displays of privilege unshared are forever painful to the underprivileged.”

I hate bondage furniture. I wish I knew what it was like to be bound to it, and played with in it, and loved in it. But I hate the thought of it now, because I used to love the hope for it.

I hold my hatred close because I loved my hope too hard, and for too long, to be indifferent about wanting to have the kind of sex I want with the people I love. I can’t be indifferent, no matter how often I try to convince myself I’m being petty. Because it’s not petty to want the sex you like with the people you love. It’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity.

And that’s what The Scene doesn’t want you to know.

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Non-monogamy: A Human Internet for Compassionate Payloads

19 Oct 2011 at 01:42

maymay

Technology, Writing and blogging

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This article first appeared on the Good Vibes Magazine, and is slated to appear in this month’s issue of SsexBbox‘s pocket ‘zine.

The Dalai Lama once said, “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” But today, as environmentalist and author Paul Hawken observed, “goods seem to have become more important, and are treated better, than people.” Faced with the existential threat of this mounting tension, our species will be forced to shoulder the challenge Jeremy Rifkin imagines we can accomplish: “extend our empathy to the entire human race as an extended family, and to our fellow creatures as part of our evolutionary family, and to the biosphere as our common community,” or perish.

Thus, the urgent question is: how do we do that? As it happens, today’s polyamory movement is uniquely situated at an ideological and technological intersection illuminating a possible answer. Polyamory’s key tenet—that a relationship involving more than two individuals is a good and valuable thing—is so powerful because it is so simple. To understand why, we can look to the Internet.

In his seminal work, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World, technology theorist Kevin Kelley wrote, “In the network economy, the more plentiful things become, the more valuable they become.” From a polyamorous perspective, one could say, “Love is not a scarce commodity,” or, even more generally, “the more, the merrier.”

A polyamory advocate’s core goal can be succinctly described as achieving equality in relationship choice. Like many polyamorous people, Angi, who “has one daughter, one husband, and one boyfriend,” sees compulsorily monogamous relationships, in which one person is “attached” to one and only one other person, as limiting. Instead, people may find more value when a person can be “attached” to more than one other person. In her own words, “we all deserve to live in a world where we are free to choose whatever relationship structure suits us the best, without being made to feel that we are some kind of freaks or degenerates.”

If you drew people as dots and the relationships between them as lines connecting the dots, the result would look remarkably similar to the topology of telecommunication networks like the Internet, wherein dots represent telephony devices (phones, fax machines, computers, etc.) and lines represent interconnections between them. However, a telecommunication network in which each device could only be connected to one other device—a compulsorily monogamous worldview—would not be very useful. Why buy a phone that can only call one other phone in the world?

This freedom to “connect” with whomever we choose, to exchange ideas with others regardless of geographic constraint, undeniably enriched our intellectual experiences. Is it so hard to imagine the same phenomenon holds true when we exchange bodily fluids or emotional adventures? Here’s how veteran web designer John Waters explained it:

In the industrial economy, scarcity established value. Natural resources such as oil, gold, and diamonds were scarce and therefore considered valuable. […] Paul Romer and other theorists introduced the “New Growth Theory”. In this model, the principle of scarcity is turned upside down.

The new theory essentially divides the world into two productive inputs: “things” and “ideas”. Only one person at a time can use things such as a hammer, a telephone, a lawnmower, or a car. On the other hand, ideas can be used by many people simultaneously, i.e., recipes, blueprints, formulas, methodologies, and software. They can be used to rearrange things. They can be copied, shared, and connected, thereby leading to more ideas. “Economic growth,” Romer says, “arises from the discovery of new recipes and the transformation of things from low to high value configurations.”

Such “transformation of things from low to high value configurations” is what the polyamory movement does with regard to relationships. The most obvious limitation with the often-monogamous notion of “true love” is that it creates a scarcity model, and free distribution is anathema to maintaining scarcity. Polyamorous people understand that “free love” is not just a hippie slogan, it is a way to create real-world emotional value.

Further, the “emotional value” derived from a polyamorous culture is not ambiguous. It can be accurately valuated, albeit not in any currency currently recognized. Instead of dollars and cents, the value it creates is of social capital, intimacy, degree of connectedness, and love. Its “currency” is none other than empathy itself; its payload isn’t digital data, but empathic experiences that cultivate shared joy. There’s even a word for this experience: compersion.

Polyamorists also developed discrete ways to “packetize” empathy and emotional communications. Conversational techniques such as “mirroring” (what Non-Violent Communication calls “reflecting”) in which a listener rephrases what they heard a speaker say, act as a kind of cyclic redundancy check, or an error-correction protocol, for emotional information transmission. It ensures that what one meant to say is what was heard, avoiding misunderstandings.

The introduction of new language—both terms and techniques for communication itself—is a profound change. In the words of asexuality activist David Jay, “By finding new ways to talk about relationships we can greatly increase our options for forming them.” In addition to the value offered by transforming the topology of relationships, there is value in having a diversity of relationship types; even healthy monogamous people have strong friendship, co-worker, familial, and other kinds of social networks that look similar to polyamorous people’s more intimate networks.

It is now our words, in the form of programming languages, that are driving the evolution of technology. Meanwhile, technologies like online social networks offer fertile soil where non-mainstream perspectives—and new languages—can take root. As Wired columnist Regina Lynn wrote, “Beyond the obvious benefits of online community, the language’s Internet-speed evolution continues to give polyamory a boost. When poly or poly-curious people stumble across the polyamorous lexicon, the discovery can help validate their worldview.” This marriage of polyamorous culture with the Internet thereby accelerates the distribution of the Dalai Lama’s prophylactic prescription for humanity.

In the early 19th century, American railways were a transportation infrastructure for commerce—a network of matter-moving devices. In the early 1990’s, the World Wide Web emerged as a general purpose infrastructure for communications—a network of idea-moving devices. Today, polyamorous and non-monogamous culture is a peer-to-peer infrastructure for the transmission of information about human relationships—a literal social network of compassion-moving devices.

As Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis observed, your structural position in a social network, and the topology of the network itself, influences many things in your life:

[I]f you imagine social networks as a kind of vast fabric of humanity—I’m connected to you and you to her, on out endlessly into the distance—this fabric is actually like an old-fashioned American quilt, and it has patches on it, happy and unhappy patches. And whether you become happy or not depends in part on whether you occupy a happy patch.

In other words, the success or failure of that quintessential American Dream, your “pursuit of happiness” is, at least in part, intertwined with others’ similar pursuits. Christakis continues:

If I were always violent towards you or gave you misinformation, or made you sad, or infected you with deadly germs, you would cut the ties to me, and the network would disintegrate. So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks. Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things, like love and kindness and happiness and altruism and ideas. I think, in fact, that if we realized how valuable social networks are, we’d spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them, because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness. And what I think the world needs now is more connections.

If our “civilization,” as our dictionaries insist, truly is “the most advanced stage of human social development and organization,” why then is humanity the only species in the world without full employment? Why are we so poorly trained in the principles of peaceful social development and organization? Accepting the polyamorous tenet, that goodness is inherent in social connectedness, is therefore fundamental to realizing our dictionaries’ aspirations.

After all, as Jeremy Rifkin said, “To empathize is to civilize. To civilize is to empathize.” If this is true, then cultivating the skill of empathy across the planet’s populace, as polyamorous culture actively endeavors to accomplish, is a prerequisite not merely for one’s own individual happiness, but also for the very survival of civilization—and our humanity.

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Dreaming of Compassion: Technology, Polyamory, and Social Justice – Public Anthropology Conference 2011

16 Oct 2011 at 13:00

maymay

My Videos, Politics of sex, Polyamory, Technology

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Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking at the 8th Annual Public Anthropology Conference hosted by American University. I was one part of a three-person panel titled “Polyamory, Monogamy, Activism & Social Change: Paradigms of Power & Praxis in Everyday Intimacy” alongside anthropologist Adam Piontek and polyamory intellectual Jason Cherry, moderated by anthropology graduate student Kristina Sweet. After Sweet offered a brief introduction of the topic, the three of us each gave a short presentation. Then we took questions from the audience and riffed on one another’s material.

Despite feeling severely out of place for most of the conference because of the über-academic surroundings, I still had a really good time! I recorded the multi-media portion of the presentation I gave at my panel session, a video of which and the (mostly-accurate) transcript is below.

For those who are coming here after meeting me, attending, or hearing about our session at the conference, I hope you’ll take the time to follow the links in the hypertext transcript below. For those of you who are already familiar with my work, most of this piece will seem like glimpses of highly self-referential previous work. That’s intentional; I met so many new people in so many various fields and, moreover, I knew that I would, that I purposefully composed what essentially amounts to a mash-up of my own previous writing and thinking on these topics, distilled as much as possible to fit within the 10 minute time limit I was given.

As you may know, I’m really disillusioned with the majority of the sexuality subculture and its willful ignorance. Traveling outside of the sex-positive filter bubble is thus a high priority, despite its difficulty and the fears it raises for me, personally. The Public Anthropology Conference was a challenge in some ways, but it was also hugely rewarding in others.

Part of me wants to sit down and write a longer post about my experience here, the conversations I’ve had, and the fascinating people I met. But in light of relatively very little sleep these past few days and the stress of travel, I’ve only got the energy to offer you the link to my #PAC2011 hashtag stream. Thank you to everyone who was there, and especially the kind volunteers who helped me get and stay connected to the Internet with guest Wi-Fi access! :)

And now, without further ado, my presentation! As usual, all original material is Creative Commons licensed. Feel free to download the presentation in any of the following formats:

I want a new American Dream. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I think that we could build it, if we try together, because we live in an amazing moment in history.

As I bet any sexually vocal person will tell you, the Internet has fundamentally transformed our ability to communicate with one another. For example, before the Internet, if you were a gay teenager in bum-fuck nowhere, you were the only gay person in the world. Now, though, after the Internet, if you’re a gay teenager in bum-fuck nowhere, you’re one of millions of gay teenagers communicating online.

This is big. This is not merely the evolution of telecommunication technologies. This is a revolution.

The Internet is such a big deal that it’s actually a revolution of all kinds—media, governance, technology itself. But it’s also a second sexual revolution, and this one—our generation’s sexual revolution—traces its roots through the first. This is where just a bit of history comes in handily.

On May 9th, 1960, the first oral contraceptive was made available to the general public; “the Pill” sparked the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Like all revolutions, no one could predict the outcome at the outset. It sparked chaos; the sexual revolution precipitated the “sex wars” in the 1980s.

Also in the 1960s—in 1962 to be exact—Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, affectionately known as “Lick,” (not kidding) first proposed a global network of computers. The project was initially adopted by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an R&D branch of the US military.

As the slogan “Make Love, Not War” spread through public consciousness in the “free love” movement of the 60s, the Internet was being recognized as a tool of generic utility and in 1969 was launched as ARPANet. “Make love, not war” is, at least poetically, a physical parallel of Internet technology.

A specification for the ubiquitous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) was published in 1973—the same year as the Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion in America. In 1986, as the sex wars raged, the National Science Foundation funded NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps Internet backbone for expressly non-commercial, essentially academic purposes. The protocol for the World Wide Web, called the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), was developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, and, of course, eventually became the most widely used protocol on the public Internet.

In the same way as Gutenberg’s printing press was recognized as a revolution, bringing with it 150 years of chaos, so too is the Internet. Before the printing press, countries were kingdoms. The invention of the printing press around the year 1440 essentially signalled the start of the end of a feudal Western social order, culminating in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which brought forth a new system of political order to Europe and, with it, the modern concept of nation states. What might replace today’s countries in 150, or even just 50 years from now?

These histories highlight the intersections of and tensions between technology, culture, and policy. Moreover, hegemonic preconceptions are especially insidious when they make their way into technology. The same-sex marriage debate illustrates this when, for instance, clerks in many jurisdictions maintaining matrimony databases try to record a new marriage and the computer systems they use ask them “Which one’s the wife?” This unintentional antipathy to the diversity of human identities and relationships, which is literally encoded into society’s infrastructure, is perhaps the greatest silent threat to our species’ survival.

Schemes for a marriage database completely free of gender and sexuality assumptions do exist. Sam Hughes’s example permits any human to marry any other human any number of times and have any number of partners simultaneously. Now, if you tried to use a schema like his, you’d actually be forced to write tons of application layer logic to enforce the legal restrictions that are placed on marriage today; our technology already offers us capabilities that are beyond our society’s understanding of the social constructs and contracts many people have and are using right now.

The Dalai Lama once said, “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” But today, as environmentalist and author Paul Hawken observed, “goods seem to have become more important, and are treated better, than people.” Faced with the existential threat of this mounting tension, our species will be forced to shoulder the challenge that political advisor Jeremy Rifkin imagines we can accomplish: “extend our empathy to the entire human race as an extended family, and to our fellow creatures as part of our evolutionary family, and to the biosphere as our common community,” or perish.

Thus, the urgent question is: how do we do that? As it happens, today’s polyamory movement is uniquely situated at an ideological and technological intersection illuminating a possible answer. Polyamory’s key tenet—that a relationship involving more than two individuals is a good and valuable thing—is so powerful because it is so simple. To understand why, we can look to the Internet.

In his seminal work, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World, technology theorist Kevin Kelley wrote, “In the network economy, the more plentiful things become, the more valuable they become.” From a polyamorous perspective, one could say, “Love is not a scarce commodity,” or, even more generally, “the more, the merrier.”

As I see it, a poly activists’ core goal can be succinctly described as achieving equality in relationship choice. That is, polyamorous people recognize that the structure of a compulsorily monogamous relationship, in which one individual is connected to only one other individual, is limiting. Instead, we argue, many people may find more value by changing the structure such that one individual can be connected to more than one other individual.

This has some remarkable parallels to the way telecommunication technologies (like the Internet) work. In essence, polyamory does for relationships what digital telecommunication technologies have done for ideas. Here’s how veteran web designer John Waters explained it:

In the industrial economy, scarcity established value. Natural resources such as oil, gold, and diamonds were scarce and therefore considered valuable. […] Paul Romer and other theorists introduced the “New Growth Theory”. In this model, the principle of scarcity is turned upside down.

The new theory essentially divides the world into two productive inputs: “things” and “ideas”. Only one person at a time can use things such as a hammer, a telephone, a lawnmower, or a car. On the other hand, ideas can be used by many people simultaneously, i.e., recipes, blueprints, formulas, methodologies, and software. They can be used to rearrange things. They can be copied, shared, and connected, thereby leading to more ideas. “Economic growth,” Romer says, “arises from the discovery of new recipes and the transformation of things from low to high value configurations.”

Such “transformation of things from low to high value configurations” is what the polyamory movement does with regard to relationships. The most obvious limitation with the often-monogamous notion of “true love” is that it creates a scarcity model, and free distribution is anathema to maintaining scarcity. Polyamorous people understand that “free love” is not just a hippie slogan, it is a way to create real-world emotional value.

It is now our words, in the form of programming languages, that are driving the evolution of technology. The corpus of this technological literature changes our physical reality, offering us everything from hormone therapies to space shuttles to online social networks.

Meanwhile, those same social networks offer fertile soil where non-mainstream perspectives—and new languages—can take root. As Wired columnist Regina Lynn wrote, “Beyond the obvious benefits of online community, the language’s Internet-speed evolution continues to give polyamory a boost. When poly or poly-curious people stumble across the polyamorous lexicon, the discovery can help validate their worldview.”

The introduction of new language—both terms and techniques for communication itself—is a profound change. In the words of asexuality activist David Jay, “By finding new ways to talk about relationships we can greatly increase our options for forming them.” In addition to the value offered by transforming the topology of relationships, there is value in having a diversity of relationship types; even healthy monogamous people have strong friendship, co-worker, familial, and other kinds of social networks that look similar to polyamorous people’s more intimate networks.

In the early 19th century, American railways were a transportation infrastructure for commerce—a network of matter-moving devices. In the early 1990’s, the World Wide Web emerged as a general purpose infrastructure for communications—a network of idea-moving devices. Today, polyamorous and non-monogamous culture is a peer-to-peer infrastructure for the transmission of information about human relationships—a literal social network of compassion-moving devices.

This marriage of polyamorous culture with the Internet thereby accelerates the distribution of the Dalai Lama’s prophylactic prescription for humanity. Or, in other words, the success or failure of that quintessential American Dream, your “pursuit of happiness” is, at least in part, intertwined with others’ similar pursuits. As Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis observed:

“If I were always violent towards you or gave you misinformation, or made you sad, or infected you with deadly germs, you would cut the ties to me, and the network would disintegrate. So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks. Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things, like love and kindness and happiness and altruism and ideas. I think, in fact, that if we realized how valuable social networks are, we’d spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them, because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness. And what I think the world needs now is more connections.”

In the latter 20th Century, the American Dream grew up in a house with a white picket fenced porch, had a college education, and got a steady job. But today, the American Dream has increasingly been seen as a platitude veiling corporate greed. Founding director of Xavier University’s Center for the Study of the American Dream, Michael Ford, sums up the situation like this:

[T]o an astonishing degree [Americans] have lost confidence in the institutions traditionally seen as Dream guardians. […] Americans feel they are on their own but they haven’t lost the Dream. They have confidence in themselves, their families and their personal networks.

So perhaps adopting the polyamorous tenet, that goodness is inherent in social connectedness, is therefore not merely a social ideal, but also a blueprint for a 21st Century version of a re-imagined, re-invigorated American Dream.

And where better to present such an idea than here, in America’s capitol city, at American University? Thank you very much.

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