thethirddecade1121:

rowanazra:

if you use okcupid there’s a new browser extension to keep the creeps away!

it’s amazing and you should download it

you should really reblog and share this it could actually save lives

THIS IS SO USEFUL!

Saves you the time of going through all the questions. I am happy okcupid throws in creeper filter questions

I’m glad the above post has gotten so many notes (6,600 plus!) in such a short time (about 24 hours!!).

That said, for the record:

• OkCupid does not throw in creeper filter questions. Users like you do.
• OkCupid’s website security is abysmal:
  

  Every OkCupid email, chat session, search, clicked link, page viewed, and username is transmitted over the Internet in unencrypted plaintext, where it can be intercepted and read by anyone on the network.

• OkCupid’s privacy policy is actively exploitative:
  

  Match.com now owns OkCupid, which means way more data sharing; Match.com itself is owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, which owns more than 50 companies and websites including CitySearch.com, CollegeHumor.com, Ask.com, Vimeo.com, Chemistry.com, and UrbanSpoon.com. IAC’s Privacy Policy allow it to share information freely between the many companies and websites it owns, as well as “Other businesses with which [it] partner[s].” In other words, your OkCupid data can be shared freely among the 6th largest online network in the world. Not very private.

• OkCupid is a company with one and only one ultimate goal: to make money off of you. The company does not care about you, the human, they care about you the product. OkCupid has historically done very little to meaningfully protect you:
  

  As social networks and dating websites become a more common means for facilitating physical-world sexual interaction between people, predators are increasingly using the information available in such networks to target victims. Some high-profile social networking and dating websites like Match.com attempt to protect their users from consent violations using deeply flawed processes, screening against national sex offender registries. The exploratory analysis outlined in this post suggests that there are better signals than blacklists like the sex offender registry, which has an enormous number of its own problems, for identifying problematic behavior across large clusters of users.”

PLEASE READ THOSE LINKS.

Only through unrelenting, unapologetic, and unending user advocacy can the corporate-controlled Internet be a place that serves you. It is currently a place where users like us are both consumer and consumed.

Are you wow’ed a thing like the Predator Alert Tool for OkCupid exists? It mostly uses technology that’s literally ten years old. Let’s fucking dream bigger.

I hope this tool makes you believe society can and should serve and protect you, not the other way around. The most powerful technology in the Predator Alert Tool for OkCupid is the simple idea that we can work together. I hope this tool inspires you to demand better from companies who profit off your data.

TL;DR: A new browser add-on automatically flags OkCupid users who have confessed to rape. It was developed by maymay, who wrote a similar tool for the dating website FetLife.com (FAADE) mentioned in The New York Observer.[0]

• http://maybemaimed.com/playground/predator-alert-tool-for-okcupid/
• http://maybemaimed.com/playground/predator-alert-tool-for-fetlife/

DID YOU KNOW that if you ask someone if they’ve ever raped (or tried to rape) another person, they’ll just come right out and tell you? As long as you don’t use the “r-word,” turns out they will!

Sounds unbelievable, right? And yet, according to a 2002 study called “Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists” by David Lisak and Paul M. Miller, published in Violence and Victims, Vol 17, No. 1, 2002 (Lisak and Miller 2002), a statistically significant percentage of respondents just say so! And this isn’t some fluke. In research conducted by Stephanie K. McWhorter, similar findings were corroborated (“Reports of Rape Reperpetration by Newly Enlisted Male Navy Personnel” by Stephanie K. McWhorter, et al., published in Violence and Victims, Vol, 24, No. 2, 2009 [McWhorter 2009]).

So, that’s what rape culture looks like: people blithely admitting to non-consensually violating people’s sexual boundaries on an alarming scale. What can we we do about it?

For starters, how about we just ask folks if they’ve raped others? Before you dismiss this as too obvious to work, take a look at the Predator Alert Tool for OkCupid, a browser add-on that uses OkCupid’s immense database of Match Questions to flag profiles of users who have confessed to exactly the kinds of behaviors Lisak and Miller first highlighted in their groundbreaking 2002 study:

http://maybemaimed.com/playground/predator-alert-tool-for-okcupid/

The Predator Alert Tool for OkCupid is designed to be immediately useful, and doesn’t require survivors to do anything at all to benefit. After a 1-click installation, it immediately begins searching OkCupid for potential predators based on their own answers to the Lisak and Miller-styled Match Questions already in OkCupid’s database. Moreover, it’s also able to automatically share information among each of its copies so that you benefit from everyone else who’s already installed it, and they benefit from you installing it, too.

Within moments of a link to the tool appearing on Reddit, a Redditor confessed to having pled “no contest” to a rape charge in court:

http://www.reddit.com/r/OkCupid/comments/1b9o79/predator_alert_tool_for_okcupid_browser_addon/c94vpai

(above Reddit thread archived at http://freze.it/1v2 )

Discussion of the Predator Alert Tool for OkCupid is now sprouting up on social media sites like Tumblr[1] and Twitter.[2] And I just thought you’d like to join the conversation. :) Here’s a tweet you can copy and paste to get started:

Early warning of tornados? Check. Want an early warning system for #rape #culture http://maybemaimed.com/playground/predator-alert-tool-for-okcupid/ Predator Alert #Tool for #OkCupid.

I hope you’re well.

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

EXTERNAL REFERENCES:

[0] http://observer.com/2012/11/the-story-of-no-sadomasochistic-sex-clubs-sprout-up-on-ivy-campuses-and-coercion-becomes-an-issue/
[1] http://days.maybemaimed.com/post/46293396057/predator-alert-tool-for-okcupid#Notes
[2] https://twitter.com/TofEklund/status/317457631751057408

If you’re moved to do so, please email the people you know who care about stuff like this. (You can just copy-and-paste the above and replace my signature with yours. Yes, really.)

See also:

• Rape Culture, meet Internet Culture: PAT-OKC and other online anti-rape initiatives
• Tracking rape culture’s social license to operate online
• What “rape culture” means (infographic)

This simple information graphic depicts various forms of privilege and oppression as a set of multiple spectra (lines) that all intersect at a central point. The ends of each line is labelled with the “privilege” on the top half of the graphic and its corresponding “oppression/resistance” on the bottom half, while the line itself is labeled with the associated “-ism”. While the graphic doesn’t use the term, it can therefore be considered a visualization of kyriarchy.

The various privileges and oppressions along with the “-ism” they relate to, respectively, depicted are as follows:

• Male and masculine/Female and feminine – gender “deviant” (Genderism)
• Male – Female (Androcentrism)
• White – People of color (Racism)
• European in origin – Non-European (Eurocentrism)
• Heterosexual – Lesbian, gay, bisexual (Heterosexism)
• Able-bodied – Persons with disabilities (Ableism)
• Credentialed, highly literate – Nonliterate, uncredentialed (Elitism)
• Young – old (Ageism)
• Attractive – Unattractive (Politics of appearance/lookism)
• Upper and upper-middle class – Working class, poor (Class bias/classism)
• Anglophones – English as a second language (Language bias)
• Light, pale – Dark (Colorism)
• Majority religion – Minority religion (Religious Oppression)
• Fertile – Nonfertile/Infertile (Pro-natalism)

Due to the complexity of kyriarchy, there are several glaring issues with this visualization. First and foremost, it’s incomplete, arguably inevitably so. Future versions should consider augmenting it with the following additional axes:

• Neurotypical – Neuroatypical (Mentalism aka. sanism)
• Dominant – Submissive (Domism)
• American – Non-American (American exceptionalism/American privilege)
• Coupled – Single (Couple privilege/dyadism?)

There are surely many more missing axes, which I encourage you to suggest in the comments or reblogs of this post. (The above are simply examples to showcase the diagram’s incompleteness.)

The other issue with this visualization is that it is dangerously binarist. In trying to elucidate the ways in which, as opinion8d said:

Many of us are multiply privileged and multiply oppressed. They don’t counterbalance each other. [Unsurreptitiously stolen from Crawford, 2006 - Transformations: Women, Gender, and Psychology.]

the graphic creates a privileged/oppressed dichotomy without acknowledging the fact that both privilege and oppression are context-dependent. For instance, in assigning youth the privileged position along the ageism axis, it makes invisible the various oppressions of adultism. This is why, in discussions of privilege, it is vital to remain cognizant of the difference between categorical and non-categorical privilege.

It is, of course, arguably impossible for anyone to design an info graphic that is 100% complete. Similarly, I think it’s foolhardy to attempt to deconstruct all this incredible complexity without appropriately scoping our conversations, defining our terms, and in the process excluding certain concepts, experiences, or identities from a given (but not every) discussion. And even if it were possible, I don’t think it would be very useful.

As I’ve said numerous times before:

Dichotomies are genuinely useful, even necessary. We use them all the time to make sense of the world around us. In fact, dichotomies themselves conveniently come in two mutually exclusive varieties! These are: true dichotomies, and false dichotomies.

Many people often get very (and I do mean very) angry at me for using tools like analogy and bisociation to make legible various forms of oppressions (“-isms”) that they do not often understand. For instance, there seems a large contingent of the trans* community (as though “the trans community” were a monolith, which is false, of course) that seems endlessly frustrated with me for my attempts to raise awareness of sexism and its intersection with domism by borrowing from trans experience.

While I understand the frustration, I feel, as I said during my Atlanta Poly Weekend 2011 seminar:

This is what in-group/out-group, us/them, you-versus-me, thinking looks like. This is how privilege hierarchies are created and recreated time and again.

Rather than conceptualizing privilege and oppression as a categorical dichotomy, a static and universalizing force, what if privilege were conceptualized as difference plus obligation? That is, since we are all “multiply privileged and multiply oppressed,” in those areas where we have privilege, we ought also couple it to an ethical obligation to use that privilege in the service of those who do not have it.

By the same token, what if oppression were conceptualized as difference plus creativity? Those who resist oppression are inherently creative. Even in acts of destruction, those who resist oppressions are creating spaces for difference, sometimes simply by virtue of their bold acts of survival.

Think about it: privilege is emptying. For instance, what does it mean to be “white”? It means to be not a person of color. What does it mean to be male? It means to be not female, for that would be “unmanly”!

I think that if we were able to internalize a fluid understanding of privilege and oppression, if we could queer the very concepts themselves, we could reliably gain the power to imagine people complexly, and thus treat one another far more humanely than we are often rewarded for (not) doing today.

Although I was ultimately unable to attend the Threshold party at Mission Control this past Saturday, I still obtained a tally of the venue’s imagery, as promised. Having received permission to share the message I got verbatim, here are Threshold “Relaunched” tally’s results:

I categorized based on sexy-women (25), sexy-men(3), and neutral-women(4), neutral-men (0).

When I first entered I was pretty impressed, as the three sexy men images were in the lobby (with the third actually more in the hall, but definitely in the entrance type area). This was all there was, however.

Most of the sexy-women images were pretty tame, vanilla images, evoking a roaring 20s aesthetic (flapper girls, etc), but when you got into the rooms that were more explicitly sexual (the orgy room and the dungeon-themed room), the images were exclusively of women, and the dungeon-themed room was entirely submissive women.

[…]

This was kind of a depressing little project.

Depressing, indeed: that’s 29 to 3.

I also asked specifically about trans-identified media:

As a followup, were you able to see any imagery that included trans iconography of any kind, or were all the pictures cisgender people?

My correspondent replied:

As far as I know, all of the images were of cis people[…], though there was one image that included cross dressing (lesbian couple, vaguely american gothic, butch/femme). I can’t really say that none of the images were of trans people, since one can’t really know how the models identify, etc, but there was no explicitly trans media, as far as I remember.

Last time I obtained a tally of Mission Control’s imagery, three months ago, the results were skewed 22 to 1 in favor of depicting female bodies. I also didn’t see any explicitly trans media then, and I even noted the very same lesbian image referenced here. So it seems “install[ing] new art,” as Mission Control said they’d do, isn’t a priority for them. What else is new?

This post isn’t really about countering systemic bias in iconographic representation—making the invisible visible so we can finally see what we want to be—important as I believe that is. This post is about something far more fundamental: it’s about why and how some things stay invisible.

Parts of our exchange offered an example of a conversation that I have with others far more frequently than I’m able to ethically share. It goes like this. Usually, upon receiving a private message with useful information in it, I respond with a request:

How would you feel about my publishing the tally you sent me as a status update, so it’s recorded on the Internet machine forever? :) I won’t cite you as the source unless you let me know that you’re comfortable with that. On a similar note, I’d also love to share your own words […] on my blog, because it adds so much feeling to the sterile numbers in the tally. But again, I’ll only do that if you’re comfortable with it, which is why I’m asking first, and I need not identify you by name or anything, either. Let me know?

Regardless, thank you again.

Sometimes their answer is no. Sometimes their answer is yes. Sometimes their answer itself offers an invaluable insight into the way systems of oppression work. This is an instance of the last case:

My first reaction in hearing you ask to use some of the text was definitely some nervousness. I know you’re offering to not use my name, but I feel that someone still might recognize me. And then I’m like “wow, there’s the power of the threat of ostracism!” Since moving [to the Bay Area], I’ve been a pretty lonely kid. so the prospect of making enemies in the scene before I’ve really made many friends is pretty scary.

[…]

Long story short: It’s shameful to find myself driven to hide my observations/experiences in order to promote my standing in the community. So, to hell with it. Yeah, go ahead and use whatever text you want.

(Emphasis mine.)

Kink In Exile explained what’s happening here more succinctly than I could: “the reason you stay within the lines is so that you don’t fall into the victim class.” And, for risking that, I would be remiss not to point out that my correspondent is braver than that word can adequately express—a new personal hero of mine. Until you are free to draw your own lines, going outside the lines others draw is vitally important; anything less than agitation is tantamount to anesthetization.

Moreover, the issue of inequitable media representation directly affects people’s experience at such “sex-positive” venues. In another portion of our exchange, my correspondent wrote of Mission Control’s Threshold party:

There was a neat liquid nitrogen demonstration, but I left when that opened up for people to try out, and it seemed pretty clear that the volunteers were all going to be women who were being urged to undress to some degree or another. It was partly a safety concern (if the nitrogen pools, it will burn), but the audience’s fervor at their undress made me uncomfortable. As a fat genderqueer, I wanted to feel what it was like, but didn’t dare go line up to try it out.

I wrote back:

While I’m sure the hosts were competent with their props, I know all too well what you’re talking about when you talk about it seeming “pretty clear that the volunteers were all going to be women who were being urged to undress to some degree or another.” And I’m sorry you experienced that discomfort, especially in a party where I know how much the hosts tried to make all their guests feel safe and comfortable, although in a rather misguided way.

Moreover, I’m sensitive to that particular discomfort you’ve described despite often presenting as a skinny man, not a fat genderqueer, for the exact same reasons.

I was at a small, private gathering just last week and although I ultimately had a great time, there was a moment early in the night when all of the women-identified people in the room were naked and none of the men were. And this kind of thing, where only female bodies are on display or are more easily (eagerly?) socially exposed, happens all the time. In Seattle several weeks ago, I was recruited to perform in a Polyamory Fashion Show because all the other male-identified performers had dropped out at the last minute, leaving only women. The organizer, bless her persistence and commitment, turned [to me and] asked me to hop in place of the others. And, only half-jokingly, I replied, “Well, in the name of gender diversity, I’ll do it!”

This is an important reminder that homogeny in iconography and representation as you describe is a disservice to all people. Until the phrase “women in porn” does not almost universally imply “skinny white able-bodied ciswomen in porn,” both men like me, fat genderqueers like you, and all women who aren’t the women included in too many people’s conception of “women in porn,” will need far too much courage to dare brave an audience’s fervor like the one you encountered.

I’d have wanted to feel what it was like, too. And I wouldn’t have dared line up in an environment like that, either.

Later, I received the following elaboration:

The hosts were great with the demo, it was definitely totally safe[…]. The issue started with the demo bottom being [a] skinny white cis woman (which is totally not her/their fault, since she’s the fiancee of the demo top and she can’t help her body type/race/status/gender). It just got bad when she asked the demo top if she should disrobe at all and the crowd started jeering for her to “take it off.” This sort of behavior continued when it was opened up for people to volunteer to feel what it was like. After one or two volunteers, I slipped out of the room to go back to watching porn.

(Emphasis mine.)

This is not a “minor” concern nor an isolated incident: it is one of the injuries leading to sexual death by a thousand cuts. I’m often asked why I am so passionate about every small cut in that set of 1,000 as I am with the most heinous iniquities in our world. I’ve long had trouble articulating an answer because the answer is so obvious to me that it’s the question which seems absurd. Everything—everything—is connected.

Again, Kink In Exile explains this succinctly:

What I didn’t realize for a long time in looking at sexuality communities is that though often experienced in a bubble these communities are not created in a bubble, and from there the connection between the devaluation of[, for example,] male submission and the experiences of American girls in math courses is glaringly obvious. Deviance from gender norms scares people because it exposes them to the potential that they will accidentally fall into the victim class.

[…]

[Therefore, i]t is good and proper to work for someone else’s benefit because every time you take down a system of oppression you take down a threat against yourself.

(Emphasis mine.)

The inverse of that statement is equally important to articulate: it is good and proper to work for your own benefit because every time you free yourself from an oppression, you offer others an escape from it, too. The lack of sexually submissive masculine imagery, for example, is not more or less important, is not more or less painful, than the business world’s “glass ceiling” restricting women’s upward mobility. Each of these are different branches of the same insidious evil, and different faces of the same struggle against it.

Divide and conquer is every oppression’s primary stratagem. Unity with diversity ought therefore be the root principle guiding every social justice movement. I do not advocate for valuing sexually submissive masculinity because those of who us express it are any more integral to a socially just world than any other group, but rather because we are an equally and uniquely integral piece of the whole.

I have learned of the diversity of intimacy from the asexuality movement, of the value of transforming the structure of relationships from the polyamory movement, of myriad physical beauties from the body-positivity movement. In Buddhism, the archetype of invincible equanimity is Guanyin, a compassionate deity whose thousand hands hold one instrument of liberation each. My pains are not an expression of self-pitying grievance. They are expressions of the struggle to fulfill an obligation to give to others the one instrument of liberation only I can forge, so that we all may use it. Each of Guanyin’s one thousand instruments of liberation has the power to heal one of the thousand cuts to sexual freedom.

Every one of you has such an instrument, because, in the words of Martha Graham:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching[…].

That’s why ostracism is so powerful and so harmful: it is the epistemic equivalent of rejecting the instrument of liberation being offered.

To all my brave correspondents, for each of your unique struggles, I want to say as I said to the person who offered me a tally of Mission Control’s imagery at Threshold:

[T]hank you so much for the effort you put into this, for relaying your experiences so thoughtfully and honestly, and for sticking with it despite the depressing outcome and personal difficulty you had that night. Thank you so, so much.

Now, go out there and keep marching.

I had been wanting to attend an event at Mission Control for a while now. One of the reasons I hadn’t is because, other than the price tag, nearly every opportunity to do so seemed to require some kind of dress code. My opinion on dress codes can be summed up as, “well, fuck you very much,” so I was turned off right quick from most of the advertised events at Mission Control.

Then, by way of Reid Mihalko, I learned about PINK. This semi-regular event seems to specifically do away with dress codes:

Dress Code: n/a… you can leave your costumes at home and just come all gussied up or even dressed down. We’ll be happy you’re there no matter what you wear!

I also highly appreciated one of the organizers’ elevator pitches, which I was fortunate enough to hear at a semi-private dinner beforehand: “You know how you can order wine at a restaurant, but that doesn’t make it a bar? Well, you and your partner can have sex at PINK if you like, but that doesn’t make it a play party. It’s just a party, and some people like to play or have sex.”

All right, I’m thinking, now I’m actually excited to check out the venue. I mean, I was interested before, but I wasn’t expecting much. This, despite the fact that I’ve heard great things about Mission Control, left and right. Still, whereas most people in this town use “sex-positive” to mean some kind of fucking utopia (and I use those words advisedly), their implementation (and their instrumentation) is more than often more than somewhat lacking.

Nevertheless, the PINK party was an opportunity to check out the space, and so I gave myself a predictable mission: scout the imagery. What I found was unsurprising: I counted 22 eroticized images of women to 1 of a man.

But this count is somewhat misleading, and I’ve had some requests to clarify. So, here’s the exacting breakdown, albeit hastily-authored.

My (admittedly subjective) criteria:

• Expressly eroticized imagery only. So-called “family-friendly” photos or imagery that does not specifically signify a “look at TEH SEXY!” were not counted. This, notably, excluded a painting of a lesbian couple in pseudo-drag above the bar from my count.
• Imagery that depicts human or humanoid creatures only. I’m not going to gender the animals. That being said, if there’s a mermaid with huge breasts in the room, that’s counted as a woman. (Yes, this kind of thing has happened before, although not at Mission Control as far as I saw.)
• Decor only, not props, toys, or play equipment. While there are certainly an overabundance of equipment specifically designed for use on women at these venues, that is a whole other can of worms and I’ll get to that later. In the mean time, I’m only looking at the items making up the “ambiance,” not the items designed for functional use.

With that said, there were a few things in the numbers I had to fudge to make sense in 140 characters. These were:

• The coffee table near the entrance was, itself, a collage of erotic images of women. While I could easily have counted this as “50+” for the women, I only counted it as 1.
• On the coffee table was The Big Penis Book. Some have said this should be counted as one for the men’s column, but I didn’t include it in the count because as far as I saw, it was picturing solely penises, not men. I don’t know about you, but I don’t consider a picture of a vagina (or, more accurately, a vulva) equivalent to a picture of a woman. Why should I consider a picture of a penis equivalent to a picture of a man?
• There was a digital picture frame on the opposite wall from the bar. This rotated through a slideshow of images. I watched it for a goodly 3 minutes or so, noting that the images changed approximately every 10 seconds. In the approximate 3 minutes that I watched the slideshow, I saw 1 and only 1 picture of a man. The rest were pictures of women. I counted this as 1 picture of a woman, not of a man, because the ratio in this particular device was about 17 to 1 in favor of women.
• There was an old-time absinthe poster near the bar that had images of demons. I recall seeing both male- and female-assigned individuals depicted on the poster, but none of them were expressly sexualized, even though it could be argued that they were “sexy demons,” and so I did not count this item at all.

As can be expected, I made a point of pointing this out to people who were wondering what the hell I was doing writing down ticks to keep a tally on my own business card. When I explained that I was keeping track of how many images of women versus images of men I found in the venue, everyone wanted to know what the count was. After telling them about the disparity in the ratio, the single most common response I got was a “Oh, that’s weird,” or “Huh, interesting.”

I found the response itself very telling. Weird, as if it’s some kind of surprise, or interesting, as if it’s unusual in sex-positive spaces. It was always punctuated with a moment of thought. “Huh. Hmm. Oh….” It was as if no one had ever considered this before.

One man I spoke to made the common remark, “Well, women are just way more fun to look at.” I can’t tell if he was being serious or facetious, and I don’t want to assume because he seemed like a nice guy, but if it was a joke I did not find it funny. In fact, it was immediately triggering and I almost left the room right then, but I got caught up in a conversation with someone next to me and then had the opportunity to discover that this man was actually kind of a well-read sci-fi geek, which I think is cool. I still did not appreciate the remark, though.

Anyway, whoever runs the Mission Control twitter feed responded to me on Twitter after I posted my tally online:

@maymaym Hi, we are aware of that situation and will be correcting as we move forward and install new art. We are open to all!

I replied:

@missioncontrol Good to hear. And I look forward to seeing a different tally result on my card next time or shortly thereafter I’m there. :)

If this sounds like a friendly threat, that’s because it is. I had a genuinely okay time at Mission Control. Not great, but okay. The people were incredibly friendly, and they did the best job at “being the bus driver” at any venue I’ve ever attended. Ever. That counts for something. It’s not so surprising, really, because while Mission Control is BDSM-inclusive, it is not actually a BDSM space, so they don’t suffer from the ridiculously pompous “WE SCARY! YOU SCARED OF US!” chest-thumping attitude prevalent in the BDSM Scene.

But their (refreshing) lack of an “I’m so much more hardcore than you” attitude does not earn them a pass on the imagery issue. And while it’s good to hear that they say they are “aware of that situation,” I have been told exactly that on Twitter about the exact same situation before, and exactly nothing has happened in that case. (I’m looking at you, Wicked Grounds.) So you’ll forgive me if I don’t exactly fawn over being reassured.

The fact of the matter is that “sex-positive,” when used by sex-positive people, is often a polite euphemism for “male gaze.” The fact that I was even conducting a tally, far less the actual results of the tally, was a novel and interesting thing betrays how little thought so-called “sex-positive” organizers actually put into representing gender equality in their venues.

You know how when you learn a new word, suddenly you see that word popping up apparently everywhere? That’s not because the word didn’t exist before, it’s because now you’re recognizing it. This is the same thing that happens to sex-positive spaces when I point this out: the notion of sexualized imagery of men simply doesn’t exist as a concept so they don’t even realize that they’ve just filled their space up with pictures of skinny, naked, white women.

I don’t think this makes sex-positive people malicious, it just makes them no better than not-sex-positive people. Both groups are equally stupid.

It’s like how I’m stupid with sports. I don’t know the first fucking thing about sports, so when I walk into a bar and there’s some game on, I can’t tell you that it’s the Bulls playing the Red Sox or whatever. All I can tell you is that some sports thing is happening on the television.

And all I’m saying is that in a community of supposedly sexuality- and gender-sensitive individuals, there is a massive, gigantic, blind spot that should be fucking embarrassing to anyone who calls themselves “sex-positive.”

Because I don’t call myself a sports fan. And I’m not going to unless I know that the Bulls don’t even play the same goddamn sport as the Red Sox. I’d look pretty fucking stupid otherwise, wouldn’t I?

UPDATE: Three months later, the imagery situation has not improved.

In January 2013, the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF), a legal advocacy organization for kinky and/or ethically non-monogamous people, released a survey about consent in BDSM communities. At the very end of they summary of findings, NCSF writes:

Additionally, 30.1% of respondents indicated that they had a pre-negotiated limit violated and 14.9% had experienced having a safe word or safe sign ignored. The aggregate total is 33%: 1 in 3 kinky people have experienced a consent violation, further emphasizing the need for greater education.

33%. That’s dramatically higher than the already-way-too-high rate of sexual assault in America (20%).

Susan Wright from NCSF says the results indicate “there is still confusion between consensual BDSM and assault.”

Wait, what?

Let me get this straight. ONE-THIRD of people that NCSF surveyed had their consent violated, and the best NCSF can say is that there is “confusion” and a “need for greater education?” Really? This isn’t an “additional” interesting finding. This is evidence of a crisis. And we should be suspicious of the motives of anyone who pretends otherwise.

I will grant that the NCSF does a lot of good work on spreading an understanding of how consent is supposed to work, and trying to improve the legal status of BDSM activities. They get it in theory, clearly, since they have a good summary of consent principles from a legal perspective up on their page. […T]hey have a fundamentally assimilationist agenda, and that’s dangerous. In short, NCSF often seems to care more about making BDSM seem safe to outsiders than making the scene be safe. And no matter what good legal work they do, the honest truth is that none of their work is of any use if we let abuse fester inside the community.

While long, this whole series is shaping up to be worth a read, starting at Part 1, especially for people not already familiar with sexuality subcultures. It’s doing a great job so far of distinguishing the individualistic BDSM experience from the horrific facts of what BDSM as a culture is really like.

I’m particularly looking forward to reading Part 3, which M. Lunas says will focus on rape culture in online communities.

Here’s something I want to throw at you folks, hopefully you’ll find this interesting and maybe helpful. Try and be open minded about this, because it might sting, but I’d like to hear what you think.

There is a problem with The BDSM Scene. Period. It’s insular and self-interested, and it’s designed specifically for, to support, encourage and protect people other than us.

That’s The Scene as a system. Particularly for profit clubs and organisations (like Fetlife), the scene is first and for most for wealthy heteronormative Male dominant and female submissive couples.

Your individual scene may seem different, you may have friends there or a tight social network of people who don’t fit into the M/f box, but for the most part the reality is that the scene isn’t supportive of Female dominants, Male submissives or anyone who isn’t straight, white, cis, and wealthy enough to make a profit off of.

Now Maymay, who is sort of an e-friend and acquaintance of mine has written about this in greater detail and with more sourcing and hard data, but look at our thread about the scene, even though only a few people responded, I’m the only person a little involved in my local scene, and my reaction is Meh, at best.

So beyond the fact that it doesn’t support you, there is also some pretty ugly stuff coming out of Fetlife right now and maybe you want to get out. That link has some tools that will still let you get relevant event information without having to actually use Fetlife.

You might also want it just in case something goes wrong with Fetlife, because they’ve built a monopoly are a single point of failure for almost the entirety of the BDSM scene.

What I want to know is what do the users of FemdomCommunity make of this?

Does it bother you that much of the community that gathers around BDSM turns a blind eye to institutionalized oppression?

Are you involved in your local scene? and if so do you feel supported and included in it?

All I’ll say is that this simple fact, the fact that “there is a problem with BDSM as a culture,” to borrow Peroxide’s words, is consistently being missed by sex-positive folks defending BDSM from what they seem to view as unfair attacks from “outsiders” in the mainstream media right now.

But, and I’m no outsider, BDSM as a culture really needs to die. That doesn’t mean people aren’t gonna get the chance to be kinky because, news flash, identifying with the BDSM community isn’t a requirement for enjoying fucking kinky sex. Ending the existence of the BDSM community as a culture won’t end how people who do BDSM (like, y’know, most sexual people on the planet) get into BDSM, and thinking that it does makes you a fascistic piece of shit who’s telling others how to fuck.

The BDSM Scene is simply lying when it pretends it’s the only game in town for kinky sex. And the sex-positive micro-celebs who are defending its existence as a culture are on the wrong side of history. BDSM’s culture is toxic, abusive, and it’s going to die. (Very, very painfully, if I have anything to do with it.)

Credit ought go to Insane Hussein Reviews for [finding this article offering insight into pro-domme work].

Sadly, Domina Vontana apparently received a massive negative blow-back from her local BDSM Scene in Washington [DC] for this piece, including from Susan Wright, founder the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF) that one blogger said was tantamount to “passive aggressive slut-shaming.” I’m finding it difficult to disagree with that assessment, but I am doubtless influenced by my personal distaste for the NCSF. That, in no small part, was spawned by from their refusal to engage in support of the KinkForAll unconferences I was helping to (un)organize when I faced serious accusations from anti-BDSM and pro-censorship activists.

The fact that the NCSF has also effectively rubber-stamped FetLife.com’s effort to keep sexual assault survivors silent [see below] is another contributing factor to my distaste of them as an organization. Further, the NCSF’s stance has long been disgustingly assimilationist. Clear as I can tell, the NCSF is nothing other than a BDSM Scene PR machine, and thus a front for systemic rapist-enabling social dynamics in the BDSM Scene all over the globe.

I can’t respect an institution that behaves that way while espousing ideals of “sexual freedom.” I don’t understand how any ethical person can.

Over on FetLife, in Susan Wright’s own words:

I wish our legal system worked for this, but clearly it’s not. 90% of kinky people don’t report violence or harassment so we have too far to go to make the the only solution right now. There has to be a huge change in society and the way abuse allegations are handled first. There also has to be a change in the way BDSM is viewed by the mainstream so we aren’t persecuted for our sexual choices.

Personally I think we need to empower the physical BDSM groups and events more. If someone is abused by another member, they should be able to make that accusation and get a hearing from the group. I was elected the Arbiter of TES for several years, and we had to deal with hard issues like this. An arbitration is a private process that would give abusers a voice, and it would give those accused a voice. Then the situation could be discussed to determine if it was a consent violation, or a technical error, a mistake in communication, or a bad scene which is not necessarily abuse. Even if there is no definitive conclusion, if someone is accused a second or third time, then a pattern exists and that person could be refused entry to attend events.

By encouraging communication about abuse, we’ll be educating people in the scene how to protect themselves. By holding people accountable for what they do, we will be encouraging responsibility for everyone. I think transparency is the key, but it has to be equal. Accusers can’t be anonymous if they are going to point fingers. That leaves the door open to false accusations.

People keep saying in this discussion here and elsewhere that false accusations aren’t important. But because of the persecution that exists around BDSM, it’s much easier to blackmail someone or destroy someone’s life by outing them. That’s what false accusers do. Blackmail is the largest form of harassment against the BDSM community according to my Violence & Discrimination survey in 2008.

That means false accusations may be a tiny part of the mainstream, but not in the BDSM community. NCSF is contacted by plenty of people who have been reported by their partner for abuse or assault after a consensual scene as a form of retaliation for breaking up, cheating, relationship problems, etc. The problem is so pervasive, that NCSF has just published two guides to navigating the social service and law enforcement systems – one for victims and the other for people accused of abuse. Criminal issues and domestic violence comprise about half of the reports we get to NCSF’s Incident Reporting and Response.

I definitely don’t want to silence accusers, but claiming that there’s no harm in false accusations is completely wrong. People lose their jobs. Child custody hearings are often venues for counter abuse allegations. And I recently spoke to a guy who was arrested by the Military Police and is going through a court martial over allegations of abuse because he lied to his sub about being married and she knew that was the best way to get him back.

So we need to find a solution that actually more transparent than accusations from behind a Fetlife sockpuppet. I would rather we created space in our educational groups where they can tell their story and their accused can respond in kind.

Sounds nice in theory, but it foregoes the fact that BDSM organizations are the ones who are maintaining the silence among BDSM’ers themselves. What good is an arbitration process in “the physical BDSM groups and events” when it is so clearly the people in those very groups that are the problem‽ Just one example, off the top of my head, is the controversy surrounding the Jade Gate in Portland, Oregon, when Mark Yu, a prominent BDSM’er in the area, was accused of sexual assault and the community rallied around him and did fuckall to support the survivor.

By the way, some time ago, I found another post offering insight into pro-domme work that I think is worth a read for anyone interested.

Last night, I attended Matriarchy at The RACK Room in Denver, Colorado, at the gracious invitation of the venue’s owners, Jeff and Headmistress Saskia. The event bills itself as:

[O]pen to ALL women (sub, slave, top, mistress, cis, trans, female-identified, etc.) and men wearing their sub, slave or bottom hats.

Men are welcome at the invitation of a female guest, but must come in a bottom, submissive, or slave role and are not allowed to top in scenes at Matriarchy events.

Apparently, the event’s been happening since at least December, 2010, when Saskia described it as:

[A] party for kinky women (including trans), be they dom, sub, switch or other. Males are allowed only as guests of a female and are considered in service to that female for the evening. Males aren’t allowed to do much of anything at this event unless a woman gives them permission.

The party’s turnout was small (maybe about 20 people or so). It also—thankfully—had a far more casual attitude around that stupid protocol than either the event’s or Saskia’s phrasing seemed to suggest, though I don’t know how much of the casual attitude was caused by the party being, well, not much of a party. The “lots of play” promised by the event invitation was had almost exclusively by the evening’s hosts, themselves.

I was there to talk about KinkForAll Denver, which I did. But I was also there because, hey, BDSM parties are where I Work, which I did, too. Such events are a bit like distributed laboratories, offering me a way to observe structural patterns in what ignorant people consistently insist is simply individual preference; having the privilege to access these laboratories in disparate locales is one of the things that helped me understand the ways in which The BDSM Scene is actually a systemic abuser.

This is also why it’s incredibly frustrating to me that members of the BDSM Scene behave incredulously when it’s revealed that there are abusers among their midst. It’s not just that real abuse does happen in BDSM communities (just like everywhere else in our violence-addicted culture), although that’s certainly heartbreaking. It’s that the BDSM Scene is an institution whose most lauded characteristics actively attract abusers.

Need proof? Just contrast Saskia’s flippant wording for Matriarchy (“Males aren’t allowed to do much of anything at this event unless a woman gives them permission.”) with the kinds of experiences often endured by people suffering intimate partner violence (“control where you go or what you do”).

Of course, it’s important to distinguish between the BDSM Scene as an institution, what I’ve termed the BDSM Scene-State, and some given BDSM play activity itself. The short-sighted and, bluntly, stupid conflation of systemic versus individualistic perspectives, coupled with dramatic misunderstandings of what BDSM ethnographer Staci Newmahr calls “the erotic-violent dualism” is the source of the absurd defensiveness with which many BDSM Scenesters adamantly deny their unflattering participation in such an oppressive system. Moreover, the very fact that I’ve heard this silly “but we’re special” story in every single regional Scene I’ve travelled is, itself, proof of the structurally abusive dynamics to which I point.

Further, the distinction between individualistic and systemic perspectives is what enables BDSM to problematize many of the things that it does, consent being the most widely discussed. By way of example, the use of safewords mirrors the US Government’s Veterans Affairs office recommended use of “code words” to help prevent intimate partner violence:

Consider finding a code word to use as a distress signal to family members, children, and friends. Inform them in advance that if they hear you use the code word, they should get help right away.

While you can “safeword” during a scene, you can’t safeword The Scene. Just as rape culture is the institutionalization of (systemic) sexism, the BDSM Scene is the institutionalization of the practice of fetishizing oppression culture; it is, to use McKenzie Wark’s phrasing, an abstraction—a double of a double. It’s no surprise, then, that so many people who are “not white, heterosexual, class-privileged, cisgendered, conventionally attractive, able-bodied, etc. [have wondered why] the BDSM Scene just doesn’t work” for them.

The BDSM Scene needs to be resisted not because the BDSM Scene is “inherently bad,” but because it is a system. The simple exercise of tallying imagery at BDSM venues exposes this nicely.

Last night at The RACK Room, I counted 22 images of women to 2 images of men. The former were mostly framed pictures on the walls, while the latter were both attached to the refrigerator and partially obscured by the jumble of postcards and other odds and ends. One conversation I had with a party-going couple in attendance was particularly telling.

“Why do you think there are so many pictures of women and so few of men?” I asked.

“Well, that’s what sexy photos look like,” the man said. “To men, anyway,” he added.

“This is also a pro-domme house,” the woman offered, “so I think a lot of it has to do with the clientelle.”

“Oh,” I said, feigning surprise. ”So why are so many of the women in the photos tied up, then?” I asked them.

“Well, again, that’s sexy,” the man said.

“For what viewer, though?” I pressed him. He paused. “Are you saying submissive men want to see women tied up when they’re paying to be dominated by women?”

“Huh,” he said, “that does seem a little odd.”

Clearly, this had never occurred to him and, more to the point, it had never pained him before. That ignorance belies a privilege. It was and always is easy to point to the most well-known oppressions, like race, gender, class, and so on. And yet there are so many others so often overlooked and sometimes even more impactful.

As with all of us, Jeff and Saskia like to tout their inclusiveness, their sensitivity, their anti-oppressive intentions. But all of these things are constrained by the limits of what we can perceive. When I am feeling generous, I believe they remain exclusive of, insensitive to, and oppressive against what they don’t see not because they are bad people, but because they are invested in—and now beholden to—the system that grants them privileges they are not even aware they have. When I am feeling less generous, I believe they are also lazy, because, come on, they’re hosting a party where the thing they’re harping on is the way males “aren’t allowed to do much of anything…unless a woman gives them permission” and they haven’t even bothered to hang some pictures of men tied up on their walls? I mean, really?

So, while it’s (relatively) easy to point out the systemic sources and influences of something so blatantly obvious like that—I say as someone who’s been enormously hurt by how difficult it’s been to make people aware of these influences—it’s just as important, yet far more difficult, to point at even more “innocuous” or “individual” situations as being influenced by and contributing to systemic cultural indoctrination.

I don’t even know how to begin discussing some of these other, more innocuous things, which makes me rather timid. So, in lieu of having much else, I’ll share a relevant portion of an email I wrote to an organizer of the Myth parties in NYC some months ago:

I do think party spaces can offer a certain value and that they are important for sustaining a certain kind of social group. However, I strongly disagree with you that party or party-like spaces offer much if any value or opportunity for “the connection of those people with potential role models” for values of “those people” who are, as I stated earlier, more like me and less like you. You are therefore creating a Scene that serves you and yours. And more power to you. But I feel strongly that you ought recognize your argument comes fundamentally from a place that frankly presumes the privilege of comfort with sexuality and sexualization itself. And consider, please, that in a world which is overwhelmingly sex-negative, the people who have such comfort are fewer and farther between than you may be ready to acknowledge, because such people include even myself, and I like to think of myself (as I hope you know) as a strong champion of the sex-positive movement.

At the risk of sounding unpleasantly rough, let me put it to you bluntly: I do not feel safe nor comfortable in a room full of people who generally know one another if I know that there is a desire among them to fuck one another when I am not already familiar with them socially. I had to work really, really, really fucking hard to feel comfortable at your Halloween party. And while I am obviously capable and willing to do that work to acclimate to social environments, I do not believe you have any clue just how much energy I poured into starting conversations, meeting people, and—for lack of a less skeevy way to put this—”working the party” to find conversational entries to meeting those who I wanted to meet. *AND I WASN’T EVEN THERE FOR THE NAKED PARTS,* as evidenced by the fact that I intentionally chose to leave your party when I noticed it was growing more…touch-focused.

Now, it is *not* your *job* to make your Halloween party comfortable for me, but, in my opinion, if you think that simply getting a bunch of kind people in a room together who are all, as your document put it, “respectful, kind, consent- and privilege-aware, awesome people who are as committed as we are to a fun, sexy, and above all, safe and consensual party,” then you are woefully under-informed about the obstacles to creating what I view as an actively socially-inclusive atmosphere for sex or any other social activity really are. And that is going to hinder the success of your party space if you view it, as you seem to, as an activist endeavor.

I realize this is harsh and critical, but I trust you not only need no sugarcoating, but prefer our conversation that way. When you said “most of my activism is sex” shortly after we met, by which I took to mean “most of my activism involves having sex and creating (safer) sexualized spaces,” I was immediately put off. I want to be clear that I respect your activism greatly, even while it is not my activism. In fact, I wish you much luck. I would love to participate in your parties; I’d totally volunteer, given the chance and some future hypothetical desire to attend. But such party-centrism so thoroughly permeates sexuality subculture that I have increasingly come to see it as syphoning off focus and attention from other activities, such as a sorely-needed greater understanding of the diversity inherent in the ways different people *are able to connect,* socially.

I was never asked “Are you enjoying yourself at this party?” or “How are you doing right now?” when I was in your Halloween party. No one asked me to tell them about who I was. Few people even bothered to start conversing with me unless and until I proved my value as an interesting person by happening to say something that sparked interest in them; and I had to stand there and listen and *look* for those openings, which is NOT something I could have done without the 8+ years of experience I’ve had at specifically trying to figure out how to navigate those social spaces.

Parties may be great for people who are attending with a cadre of friends, lovers, or other pre-established social connections. But they are frankly often very, very poor experiences for people not yet connected to a social *group.*

Again, none of this is a slight on you or your Halloween party. It is simply a retelling of my experience in the hopes that by being brutally honest about my experience that night might make you aware of a whole different set of experiences, ones that may heretofore have been invisible to you. I am, after all, very practiced at hiding this personal difficulty for the sake of social ease; and those who are not as good at hiding this difficulty do not often last long in such spaces. Thus the chicken-and-egg that I expressed frustration with in my “Fuck The Community” post repeats again. And again. And again. :(

[…]

I hope you raise the bar on the standards with which party organizers organize parties. God knows that’s needed, because most parties are fucking awful, sexually-classist spaces that I routinely, actively and unapologetically lambaste. In my view, they deserve it.

But it’s still a party. And unless Myth is a space where the kind of *active inclusion* I described lacking from your Halloween party is practiced, I frankly don’t think it’ll amount to much beyond a new Scene, and I simply don’t find new Scenes worthy of much investment.

[…]

Yeah, [a party can be a valuable space for queer people to connect with each other]. And for some, it is. Great. For many, it’s not. For many, there is no more dreadful feeling than being in the center of a crowded room and still feeling lonely for reasons that the “party” is simply unable or, worse, unwilling, to address.

No, Myth wasn’t a place of “active inclusion,” but that is a post for another day. Very few parties are. I’ve only been to 1 in my whole life where it wasn’t “the host’s job” to say hello and ask how people were doing, where people simply came up to me to ask with genuine, empathetic interest, “How are you feeling?” Even most “intentional communities,” who often enjoy defining themselves with a rhetoric of openness, behave hypocritically in this regard; they are just a clique with a fancy name.

I don’t find fault with individuals for systemic abuses. It’s the system supporting the hypocritical behavior I hate, and so should you, because such systems intentionally enforce ignorance.

Last October, I introduced the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE) at the 2012 Transcending Boundaries Conference. In the final session of the conference, I facilitated a community forum about the tool and the issues it addresses more generally. Watch the entire session, “Help FetLife’s Rape Culture FAADE Away,” online or read the full transcript.

FetLife.com, an online meeting place for fetish and BDSM enthusiasts, censors the postings of its users when they allege other users of the site have raped, assaulted, or otherwise violated their consent, giving rise to a new grassroots movement within a youth S&M subculture committed to supporting survivors of sexual assault.

In this community forum facilitated by Social Justice Technologist and veteran BDSM community muckraker maymay, participants discuss the endemic problem of abuse within the BDSM Scene and brainstorm ideas for how to combat a terrifying status-quo. Using academic sources such as David Lisak’s and Stephanie McWhorter’s research on Predator Theory as a springboard, maymay introduces a new tool called the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE) to assist the community in its search for strategies to fight the “hush-hush” mindset that keeps rape culture so prominent in formalized BDSM organizations.

“The BDSM community has had, in its modern incarnation, at least two decades to develop some system of self-policing to keep abusers out, and what it’s done instead is promote abusers to positions of power,” said one participant.

“Fuck asking permission,” maymay concurs. “Fuck asking for cooperation from the powers that be that have shown us that they’re not interested in doing anything other than continuing to silence and abuse their own institutional positions and powers to maintain a status quo that is actively dangerous, actively abusive, and only serves themselves. I’m over it. It’s done, and it needs to go away. And it can if we all cooperate on building tools like this, and promoting these tools to others.”

Learn more and spread the word about the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE) at http://tiny.cc/faade

Read a full transcript of this session at http://maybemaimed.com/?p=4531

An excerpt from the session:

[O]ne of the concerns that I heard that wasn’t raised here, specifically, but that I heard out there in the conference, was, “Well, if I use this tool, I’m afraid FetLife will ban me.”

Number one: well, shit, isn’t that kind of part of the problem? And number two: yes, that’s why we can’t trust FetLife and can’t communicate with them at all. Does that makes sense? Okay, I see nodding. Any questions about those two pieces?

False accusations: bring it the fuck on. And here’s why. In both situations, where the accusation is “objectively” true, whatever the fuck that means, and also in situations where it is not true, this tool will—and the use of this tool, and the reporting of these allegations, and the sharing of these allegations—forces a consent conversation to the surface and empowers people to actually deal with the issues rather than continue to sweep them under the rug, in several different ways.

If you have a allegation levied against you and you feel it’s inappropriate or unfair, what can you do? You can ignore it, such as we’ve been doing already. Or you can, when you see that you have a report such as this one showing up on your profile above orientation, looking for, etcetera, at the very top of your profile, and you also have this very lovely, provided by FetLife—thank you, FetLife!—editable box right here. It’s called “About Me.” I propose that you respond to the allegation in the About Me section. And what that does, is several things. Number one: gets information about consent violations and alleged assaults out of this tool and onto FetLife. Wonderful. Number two: it will offer us the ability to see how people actually respond to these allegations.

Now, currently, the state of affairs is that if you do not have an alleged accusation against you, you are perceived more or less to be safe. A safe player: “Don’t worry, this person’s fine.” The problem with this is, number one, you very well may have an accusation against you. There may very well be an accusation against this person that you don’t know about because this information is siloed. And that is what the whole ConsentCulture project, that’s what people have been reporting, that’s what people have been saying. In fact, in the live—where is it? Oh, here it is—in the data here, people are already saying here, “This person had a reputation for known BDSM-related consent violations,” etc. It would have been great to know that. But this person probably didn’t have any information about this. So, [FAADE] will surface that.

Read the full transcript….

See also:

• Tracking rape culture’s social license to operate online