Just like last year, I was bowled over by the conference organizers’ hospitality. Just like last year, the conference brought together some of the brightest and most passionate people to discuss polyamory and its relationships with other social communities, political and interpersonal ideas, and, of course itself. Just like last year, I’m having a great time on far too little sleep.

I’m extremely grateful to have had the privilege of helping set the tone for this years’ event as the Opening Keynote Speaker. I wanted to do the conference attendees, as well as the people who were not able or willing to participate in the conference, justice. To that end, my keynote was intentionally confrontational; I even (metaphorically) burned the conference’s logo (in my slides).

My keynote was an act—part seminar, part performance—I hoped would shine a white-hot light onto a topic too often left unexplored and under-valued at polyamory conferences, meetups, and other events I’ve been to. It’s a topic I’ve come face-to-face with in a painful way, thanks to my sudden awareness of how it’s been impairing my ability to have “polyamorous relationships.” And it’s a topic I knew would ruffle some feathers.

The immediate feedback I got from Billy Holder, APW2012′s General Operations Director, was unsurprising: “There were…mixed emotions….” That’s good. That’s useful. That’s the point.

I commend Billy and his crew not merely for putting together a conference, but for putting together a conference that welcomed and encouraged disagreement, confrontation, and curiosity. There are things I think they did badly, but I think most of these were caused by the structural issues I addressed in my talk, not from a place of intentional malice. Most of all, I think they did the most important thing extraordinarily well: they prevented their idea of perfection from becoming the enemy of good. And if that were the only thing they did well, and it sure isn’t, I think Atlanta Poly Weekend 2012 is offering an invaluable thing to all communities.

If this trend holds, I have no doubt next year’s Atlanta Poly Weekend conference will be invaluable, too.

And now, without further ado, following is a transcript of my Atlanta Poly Weekend 2012 Opening Keynote address. After I find some time to prepare them, I’ll also publish my slides, along with a video for you to download. Like all my similar work, this presentation is “open source” and Creative Commons licensed. Should you feel so moved, downloading it, using it yourself (including, since I can only be at one place at one time, literally re-presenting it wherever you wish and are able), redistributing it, or sharing it with anyone you think might find it valuable is encouraged. If you do any of these things, I would greatly appreciate it if you would link back to this page. :)

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My name is maymay. When I was a teenager, I ingested a poison that gave me an incredible power. The poison was a gift that, today, lets me perceive things many others cannot—and it was a gift that turned me into a monster. This is my story. This is how I learned about relationships.

Did you see the frightened ones?
Did you hear the falling bombs?
Did you ever wonder
why we had to run for shelter
when the promise of a brave new world
unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?

Oooooooo ooo ooooo oooh….

Did you see the frightened ones?
Did you hear the falling bombs?
The flames are all long gone,
but the pain lingers on.
Goodbye blue sky.
Goodbye blue sky.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.

My power is a gift; we all have one. I am grateful to have been invited to stand in front of you today to share this gift, this superpower. It’s what lets me create awesome, beautiful things. It’s what empowers me to empower others. And, at the same time, it’s what enables me to hurt people. People like you.

My power does not feel good. It is not light, or happy, or pleasurable, or comfortable. It is not nice, or loving, or fluffy, or soothing. But it is intimate, and when I use it, it will suddenly create a relationship between us that is strong, resilient, and unignorable.

If at any time during this session you feel you no longer want to be in this space with me, then remember that you are already empowered to leave. I won’t be insulted. I want you to prioritize yourself above all other people, because I want you to understand why putting yourself first is the key to putting me—and every other person participating in this conference, if not this amazing experience we call life—first, too.

I know that can sound, to many, as though it’s paradoxical. How can putting yourself first actually be putting me first, too? I’m about to show you. But, to see it, you have to be willing to feel uncomfortable with me.

Are you ready?

“Polyamory” doesn’t empower “Relationship Choice”

1. See Abe.
2. See Belle.
3. See Abe and Belle fuck.
4. See Claire.
5. See Claire and Abe fuck.
6. See Belle and Claire fight.
7. See Belle and Abe fight.
8. See Claire and Abe fight.
9. See Abe’s and Belle’s flight.

What happened here?

On page 61 of her book, What Does Polyamory Look Like?: Polydiverse Patterns of Loving and Living in Modern Polyamorous Relationships, polyamory educator Mim Chapman, Ph.D. describes this situation with a dramatization that will no doubt sound familiar to many of you:

Unwary couples can make a wrong turn on their way to forming an inclusive Poly-L Triad, and end up in a non-inclusive, Non-Triadic “V” by mistake. Two primary partners may have decided to open up their relationship, with the goal of forming an inclusive Triad[…].They commit to collaboration and egalitarian decision-making in choosing their new partner(s). Then one primary partner “jumps the gun” and does the old, “I see her, I want her, I take her, I commit to her.” After a few months, he brings her home to his primary, assuming the existing partner will immediately adore hot new love object and Poof, they’ll be a big, happy, inclusive Poly-L Triad.

Once in a while this actually works, but more often the response from the existing primary partner is something akin to “So what am I, chopped liver? Which head were you thinking with, and how did you manage to forget our commitment to egalitarian decisions about who we bring into our lives? What made you forget that we committed to working together openly in building family, and to collaborating in choosing people we both genuinely enjoy, who enhance both of our lives while we enhance theirs? We agreed that we’d work together in the initial process of getting to know a potential new partner and finding out whether or not there is an interest in joining both of us to form the Loving Poly-L Triad we long to create together. But you leapt over the fence on your own, buddy! You picked her, she’s yours, and you and she can pack up and move on down the pike, or at least carry your relationship elsewhere.”

I’m making this a bit more dramatic than it often ends up being, just to remind you that waiting a few more hours or days can be a good idea, in order to discuss the potential love with your primary partner.

While her intentions are clearly golden, Mim missed a critical concept, a concept so central it’s even encoded in polyamory advocates’ language: “relationship choice.” Can you sense what’s missing?

Let’s replay the situation, in “slow motion,” one frame at a time.

1. Here’s Abe again. Now, Abe is a man. He’s a single individual. He’s represented as a single dot.
2. Here, we have Belle. Now, Belle is a woman. She’s also a single individual, so she’s also represented as a single dot.
3. When Abe and Belle meet, and possibly also when they “fuck,” a relationship is created between Abe and Belle. That relationship is represented as a line between the dots. This creates a structure called a “couple” or, more precisely, a dyad.
4. Since Abe and Belle’s relationship exists before anyone else enters into the picture, we often also call them “primary partners.” Let’s call Abe “Primary 1” and Belle “Primary 2.”
5. Next, here’s Claire. Claire is a woman, like Belle, and as such is also a single individual, like both Belle and Abe. Therefore, she’s represented as a dot.
6. When Claire and Abe meet and, again, possibly also “fuck,” a new relationship is created between them. This, too, is represented as a line.
7. Since Abe already has a “primary” relationship with Belle, Claire is a “secondary,” and specifically Abe’s “secondary.” We’ll call her “A-Secondary 1.”

This is the critical junction. This structural shape, as you may know, is called a “Vee.” Although the prototypical terms are words like “primary” and “secondary,” they are authoritarian, not structural. Therefore, in this vee, Abe is what I’ll call the apex—the highest level of hierarchy—while Belle and Claire are both terminals. When this happens, Belle and Claire are in a relationship, but neither they, nor Abe, know it yet.

This is the point when, in Mim’s dramatization, “one primary partner ‘jumps the gun’ and does the old, ‘I see her, I want her, I take her, I commit to her.’” In fact, the instant Claire met Abe, a relationship between Claire and Belle is created, regardless of whether Abe and Claire have been sexual with one another. In polyamory’s jargon, the word for this relationship is “metamour.”

For those unfamiliar with the jargon, allow me a brief digression to expound on polyamory’s language.

Polyamory’s Fetish for Neologisms

The term “metamour” is a neologism, which itself, “is a newly coined term, word, or phrase, that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language.” It’s a combination of two words. “Metamour”’s prefix, “meta,” is derived from the Greek “μετά” meaning “self” and, in English, means “about (itself)”. Its root is “amour,” meaning “love.” In a polyamorous context, “metamour” therefore means “love about love.” The term is an abstraction from the mainstream’s “paramour.”

According to most English dictionaries, “paramour” is defined as…

(noun) A lover, especially the illicit partner of a married person.

…while these terms’ shared root, “amour,” is defined as:

(noun) A secret or illicit love affair or lover.

I love how polyamory appropriates terms about intimacy that, in mainstream use, carry a negative connotation and reframes them in a positive light. Here’s how the Polyamorous Lexicon redefines “paramour”:

PARAMOUR: (literally, par way + amor love; by way of love) 1. A married person’s outside lover. 2. A mistress—the unmarried female lover of a married man. 3. A nonmarried member of a polyamorous relationship.

Unlike mainstream language, which focuses almost exclusively on idealized sex acts, polyamorous language is filled with terms that describe the structure of nodes in relation to each other. For example:

• This is a “couple,” but can also be called a dyad.
• This is a “threesome,” but can also be called a triad.
• This is a “foursome,” but can also be called a quad.

As we add more dots to the graph, polyamory’s terminology becomes more ambiguous:

• This is an “intimate network.”

If we examine polyamorous terms closely, however, we’ll sense an obvious deficiency: it focuses almost exclusively on the nodes, the dots in the graph and their structural position in relation to one another, but does not describe the intimate interaction itself. Polyamory does not describe the lines between the dots with any significant granularity.

Ironically, this deficiency is obscured by the way polyamorous people discuss polyamory, themselves.

How Polyamory’s Institutions Undermine Relationship Choice

If we succumb to contemporary polyamory rhetoric, in which “metamour” carries all kinds of behavioral connotations and poly-cultural scripts, Belle and Claire are now coerced to relate to each other “as metamours,” without ever consenting to have this kind of relationship. Neither of them were given a choice, asked for input, or even considered by the others. They couldn’t have been, because they don’t yet even know the other exists.

This coercion is subtle, and often justified by polyamory’s proponents as “a good idea.” It’s an oppressive behavior borne from the desire to be more loving, not less. I know this because I am guilty of hurting some of the people in my life in this way—and, very likely, so are you.

This systemic oppression has a name, dyadism, and it’s perpetrated in subtle and not-so-subtle ways by people with couple privilege. Sadly it’s a privilege most strongly denied by polyamorous people who have it. For the purposes of this talk, I’ll borrow heavily from John Bell’s work on adultism and define dyadism (and couple privilege) as:

behaviors & attitudes that presume people in a dyad are more important than others and entitled to act upon them without their consent.

In many of our experiences, the people with whom we have pre-existing relationships still claim certain “dibs” on us, and we claim certain “dibs” back, on them. In one way or another, especially in romantic entanglements, most of us are subtly told what to feel, told what to do, and told what to want. Even if a new person is welcomed into an existing relationship structure as an “equal,” it’s common to assume the pre-existing dyad’s relationship agreements are automatically enforceable on the new person, unless and until they are re-negotiated. However, for the most part, the polyamorous world considers this treatment of people acceptable because we were treated in much the same way and internalized the idea that “that’s the way you have relationships.”

The essence of couple privilege is disrespect of individuals and individuals’ agency. Consider how the following statements are essentially disrespectful. What are the assumptions behind each of them? Do you remember having heard any of these when you were developing your polyamorous relationships?

• “You’ll really like your metamour.”
• “Before you get involved with someone else, you need to check in with me.”
• “You need to get along with my other lovers.”
• “You need to meet all the people I’m involved with.”
• “What do you know? You haven’t met her!”
• “We have an agreement that we only date as a couple.”

What most polyamorous people misunderstand is that the “metamour” structure in no way describes how Abe feels towards either Belle or Claire, or vice versa. That’s so important it deserves being repeated: a metamoric relationship is a structure. It is not a form of intimacy, or closeness, or even a kind of “togetherness.”

The lines on these graphs are not about sex, or even love. What’s depicted in graphs like these is not (necessarily) an attempt by one person or another to behave lovingly or hatefully towards anyone else; interacting with other people is simply what happens in the course of life for a social species, like us. Once a relationship—of any kind—is established between any two given nodes in a social network, adding a third node automatically positions one an apex and the other two, terminals.

This same diagram, often used to describe sexual, romantic, or life-partner relationships, could just as accurately describe strong friendship, co-worker, familial and other kinds of social ties. In that case, instead of the lines representing so-called “intimate” relationships, they could represent a slew of other types. Perhaps Abe employs both Belle and Claire and, since Claire was hired after Belle, Abe trusts Belle’s work more than Claire’s. In such a situation, it is still accurate to describe Claire and Belle as structurally, if not romantically, equivalent to what polyamorous jargon calls “metamours.”

Such “metamoric relationships” abound. They’re not limited to (sexual, romantic) polyamorous relationships. As a social movement, polyamory shines at articulating this deep understanding of conceptual structure—that is, the structure of ideas. The core of that is the metamoric relationship.

Metamoric relationships are so common, in fact, that the polyamory community is ethically obligated to relinquish its monopoly over them. Currently, the term is exclusively used to describe the identical positionality of two terminals to an apex of a person’s sexual or romantic relationship. But if we, as polyamory activist Angi eloquently said, want 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,” then we must make it okay to describe our co-workers, our siblings, and everyone else with whom we share a mutual relationship, as “metamours.”

For instance, in the relationship involving Mish, my Work, and I, Mish and I are metamours. My Work is the apex, while Mish and I are terminals. The same is true if you replace me with Rebecca, or Alisa; in that case, Mish and Rebecca or Alisa are metamours in relation to my Work. The reason is obvious: they all have an influence on my Work. In much the same way, you—yes, you—and I are also metamours in relation to my Work because I created this presentation and you’re consuming it.

If we actually understood “metamour” like this, we could avoid the pitfall of privileging sexual or romantic relationships over any others, we could stop excluding asexual-identified people, and we could treat our relationships or commitments to our jobs, friends, and natural environment with the same level of importance we place on our sexual partners. Of course, you wouldn’t have to treat all these relationships as being of equal importance to you, but at least then you would be one step closer to making a self-empowered choice to place whatever degree of importance you want on whatever relationships you have, rather than be bound by pre-imposed cultural scripts that decree “sexual relationships are the most important.”

If our goal is truly “equality in relationship choice,” we must stop privileging sexual(-romantic) relationships over others, or we will continue to undermine ourselves.

Whenever we use a label to describe one of our relationships, be it “wife,” “boyfriend,” “partner,” or, yes, even “metamour” we put ourselves into a box from which we must struggle to escape. That’s why, throughout this talk, I’ve been using the word “relationship” liberally. In asexuality activist David Jay’s words:

Describe a relationship as a “friendship” and people will make a set of assumptions about how important that relationship is in your life, how you feel about the person and what sort of commitments you’ve made to one another, describe it as “romantic” and you’ll get another set of assumptions [but] most of the time neither set of assumptions is very accurate.

[…]

I use relationship in the broadest possible way, the dictionary definition of “a connection, association, or involvement.” I have a relationship with my computer, the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in my glass of water have a relationship, so does a nine year old and her multiplication tables. “Relationship” describes the full spectrum from friendship to romance and then some, it gives people almost no room to project false assumptions about what kind of relationship you’re talking about, which is what you want.

Rather than relate to the idea of metamours as the generically useful concept that it is, the polyamory movement has institutionalized it to the point of self-sabotage. This is a dire mistake.

Making the mistake of institutionalizing “metamour” is part of what makes “polyamory” a failure in others’ eyes—and they’re correct to believe so. This mistake is part of what neutralizes polyamory’s ability to ground itself in its superpower. This mistake is a poison inside polyamorous communities.

Making the mistake of institutionalizing “metamour” is one way we, as polyamorous people, are still being controlled by The System (of kyriarchical oppression). Making this mistake is one way we, as polyamorous people, create communities that abuse other people. Making this mistake is one way we, as polyamorous people, are abused by the very communities we created.

Often, I hear polyamorous people decry opponents like social conservatives, polygamists, sexist unicorn hunters, and entitled, homophobic men. None of these things can stop polyamory’s superpower, because what polyamory has to offer the world is a superpower. But before we can understand our greatest power, we have to understand our greatest vulnerability.

Polyamory’s kryptonite—the one thing from our own world that can kill us—is not conservative activists. It’s not the one-penis policy, although that’s some seriously sexist, homophobic bullshit right there. It’s not even the institution of coupled marriage. Polyamory’s kryptonite is the institution of metamours.

When we think we need to behave “as metamours”—however we were told metamours should behave towards one another—instead of simply as we choose to relate to other people in our lives, we’re no different than monogamous people trapped in heteronormative gender roles, traditional marriages, or worse. Relationship labels, such as “husband” or “wife,” along with the institutions they reference, such as “marriage,” destroy one’s freedom of relationship choice by coercing us to relate to the institution rather than the person.

Instead of having an actual, unique relationship with the person they married, most married men relate to their wife by “being a husband.” Similarly, instead of having an actual, unique relationship with certain people in their “intimate networks,” most polyamorous people relate to one of these people by “being a metamour.”

These are fundamentally dehumanizing, frighteningly pervasive, and totally invisible patterns of behavior. That is, we do not even know we’re carrying them out. To understand why, it’s important to clarify the way we communicate about communication itself.

Communicating about Communication

Language is a superpower. It turns the impossible into the possible. Without the ability to describe an idea, that idea does not exist. At least, not for those who lack the power, or the language, to perceive it.

But the impetus, the force of that idea, does exist. Invisibly, it affects any entity sensitive enough to perceive what it knows it does not yet know. The impetus calls on that entity—be it you, me, or something else entirely—in an as-yet-indescribable way to realize the idea. It pulls that entity toward feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. There is no English word to adequately describe the inexplicable total consumption such an influence has. Therefore, I simply call it “the Work.”

To under-sensitive others, the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of their comrades are themselves inexplicable, as such behaviors are artifacts the Work manifested. However, to these under-sensitive others, such inexplicable behavior is frightening precisely because they don’t know its source; when something is invisible, one simply doesn’t register its presence, so there’s no reason either to fear nor explore it.

However, when we are confronted with behavior we do not understand, what was once invisible becomes visible—and unexplainable. Reactions to this experience are so common we have a word to describe those who confront us in ways we do not understand: we say they are “crazy.” We create a divisive binary: we are sane, they are insane.

Creating divisive binaries is a pattern of behavior that exists at every scale of human interaction, from the individual, to the societal. In his review of James C. Scott’s 1998 book, Seeing like a State: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed, Venkatesh Rao succinctly describes this behavior as “the rationalization of the fear of (apparent) chaos.” He outlines a recipe that explains why “a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring” in almost all areas of human experience:

1. Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
2. Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
3. Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
4. Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
5. Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
6. Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
7. Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility.

This is the central driving force of injustice and oppression: through our desire to make legible that which we cannot read, coupled with a fear of our own limitations made visible to us by a confrontation with that which we do not understand, we unwittingly perpetrate extraordinarily brutal levels of non-consensual violence, even and especially when we think we are doing good.

All oppressions use the following, invariable pattern: obscure, divide, conquer, and homogenize. That pattern is oppression; that is the DNA of evil itself. Evil cannot be conquered, for any attempt to resist evil using conquest empowers it anew.

The cunning of that ploy is why we must learn to recognize the super-powers encoded in our many languages. We must internalize an ability to be strengthened by our weaknesses, and be curious about our fears. To do that, we must first learn how to see what’s invisible, and how to read what’s illegible.

Fractal boundaries: Disruption and resistance are sensors

How can we see invisible things?

Imagine a river. At the bottom of the river are rocks and other sediments, arranged on the riverbed in a certain pattern. This pattern creates a specific texture, a roughness that gives the riverbed its shape. At the top of the river is the water, also flowing in a certain pattern, with a dynamic texture.

The texture at the top of the water is directly influenced by the texture of the riverbed. If you throw a rock into the river, it’s obvious you’ll forever change the texture of the riverbed, but you will also forever change the texture of the water atop the rock you threw. The implications are thus obvious but one of them is often overlooked: if you want to know the texture of the riverbed, you could examine the riverbed itself, but you could also examine the texture of the water.

This relationship is called a fractal: the rock on the riverbed and the water atop the river’s flow have a relationship that is invariable at every level of scale. Identifying invariability is the key to perceiving patterns. The way to identify a fractal boundary is to violently disrupt it such as, in this example, throwing a stone into a river.

That’s why people throw stones into rivers: to create ripples—to effect change. But, sometimes, you don’t need to cause the disruption yourself. Sometimes you simply need to look for artifacts of resistance.

Imagine a mountainside. On the mountainside are trees, again, arranged on the Earth in a certain pattern. Between the trees is air, constantly moving, constantly invisible. You can’t see it, you usually can’t feel it, and even rarer can you hear it. But when the wind picks up, the trees start to move, rustling loudly. They are resisting the air, making what was once literally invisible visible, what was once perhaps inaudible, audible.

This friction, this resistance, this physical confrontation between the trees and the wind is violent. When the violence exceeds a certain level of scale, the wind becomes a storm. Take it one level of scale further, and the storm becomes a “natural disaster.” A soft breeze hitting a single tree is not conceptualized as “damaging,” but a tornado can uproot trees, destroy entire forested areas, and kill people.

Recently, I hiked a hillside in the Colorado mountains. It was cold, and very windy. The wind’s howling swept the voices of my hiking partner and I away from one another’s ears—it literally impeded the vibrations in the air that our speech projected towards each other. My hiking partner said, “I want to talk to you but it’s so noisy! I want to find a quiet place where we can sit and chat!”

“Don’t worry,” I called back. She looked puzzled for a moment, so I explained, “We have everything we need to make ourselves a quiet place right here on the mountain!” Again, she looked puzzled. “Listen to the wind! All we have to do is move around the mountainside, or wait until the wind changes direction, and it will be far quieter; the Earth is a technology we can use to make our environment quiet.” She smiled, and we hiked on.

I believe this holds true in every conceptual domain, from science, art, to all coherent organization of human experience. In each case, the fractal boundary exposes the invariability of the pattern. Humans perceived atoms for the first time by rupturing molecules at their bonds; we detected black holes and neutron stars by observing their gravitational forces on other objects nearby.

Boundaries are the keys to unlocking knowledge: they are the point at which invisible things must change in some way. That moment of change—that moment when the thing that was is disrupted and thus transformed into the thing it is about to be—creates artifacts we can use to sense the existence of things we didn’t even know that we were not aware of. That is, if and only if we acquire the appropriate skills, the appropriate conceptual and somatic sensors.

If you want to cause the most pain when you bite someone’s neck, find the boundary between their carotid artery and the neighboring tendon. Once you find that point, press your fingers there. You can use the boundary to gauge your position, isolate your target—either the artery or the tendon—then, bite.

[BEGIN Audience participation:

With this knowledge at hand, let’s practice disrupting the fractal boundaries all around us in social space here, now.

END Audience participation.]

“Resistance is Futile”—Polyamory is being assimilated by The System

[BEGIN Audience participation:

• SAY:
  • “Everyone raise their hands. Now, keep your hand up if you’re currently a secondary or filling a role like a secondary to some other partner. Okay, now keep your hand up if, throughout your entire relationship history, you have mostly been a secondary or filling a role like a secondary. Okay, finally, keep your hand up if, throughout your entire relationship history, you have only been a secondary or filled a role like a secondary—if you have never had anything resembling a primary relationship, regardless of how ‘casual’ or ‘serious’ that relationship was, and regardless of how long that relationship lasted?”
• IF VERY FEW HANDS ARE UP, say:
  • “Look around you. Look how few hands are still up. These are people I’ll call ‘OMS’s,’ or ‘Only-or-Mostly-Secondaries.’ Why do you think so few ‘OMS’ are here?”
• ELSE, say:
  • “Now, how many of you are speakers, presenters, or staff members with decision-making power at this event?”

END Audience participation]

Within the polyamorous world, arguably the most marginalized group of people are those called, or treated like, “only-or-mostly-secondaries,” or “OMS.”

People in marginalized groups do not show up at conferences organized by people with the privilege they, themselves, lack. People in marginalized groups do not identify with the language created by people with the privilege they, themselves, lack. Only-or-mostly-secondaries are behaving polyamorously but, due to the oppression they face in the social structures developed by this community, such as this conference, they do not identify as polyamorous; what use have they for “Atlanta Poly Weekend”?

What does it mean to be “secondary”? It means to be non-primary. It means to be considered less important than others. Some ways to think about this are:

• Secondary is to person of color as primary is to white, since to be a person of color means to be not-white.
• Secondary is to female as primary is to male, since to be female means to be not-male.
• Secondary is to gay as primary is to straight, since to be straight means to be not-gay.
• Secondary is to insane as primary is to sane, since to be sane means to be not-crazy.

Only-or-mostly-secondaries have been excluded by the supposedly inclusive structures of “the polyamorous community.” There are so few, if any, people who are only-or-mostly-secondaries in their relationships at this conference because their experience of polyamorous structures is one in which the structure itself has abused them. Only-secondaries do not want to surround themselves by people who are often not even aware such a thing as painful to them as “couple privilege” exists.

Recall again the DNA of evil itself, the pattern of oppression at work:

1. obscure,
2. divide,
3. conquer,
4. homogenize.

This pattern maps perfectly onto the oppressive systemic behavior at the scale of our society at large in relation to the poly community:

1. Obscure the validity and possibility of polyamorous relationship structures by enforcing monogamy.
2. Divide people into groups, such as married and unmarried,
3. Conquer the oppressed (unmarried) group by making marriage a symbol of success and status,
4. Homogenize the dominant group by institutionalizing the structure of marriage into law and other societal standards.

Sadly, this pattern also maps perfectly onto the oppressive systemic behavior at the scale of the poly community in relation to secondaries.

1. Obscure the subtleties of couple privilege,
2. divide people into groups, such as “polyamorous” and “monogamous,” or “primaries” and “secondaries,”
3. conquer the marginalized group by excluding them from decision-making processes,
4. homogenize the dominant group into institutional structures, such as an “inclusive Poly-L Triad.”

In her 2006 book, Transformations: Women, Gender, and Psychology, Mary Crawford wrote:

Many of us are multiply privileged and multiply oppressed. They don’t counterbalance each other.

As polyamorous people, we have endured the epistemic abuse of living in a world constantly telling us that we are, in Angi’s words, “freaks or degenerates.” Many of us have been forced to repress parts of ourselves, to lie about the relationships we have, to keep them hidden from parents, employers, and sometimes even spouses.

We want to believe we know right from wrong, good from evil. But, do we?

The elephant in the room at poly conferences, meetups, and communities is the centering of a couple’s experience. That is absurd! That ought to infuriate us! For fuck’s sake, it’s a “POLY” event!

The System is ingenious, pernicious, and it is inside of us because we are a part of it. And it is because we are a part of it that we’ve been unable to perceive the possibilities of what lies beyond. Like a Dark Wizard’s Horcrux, The System has placed pieces of its soul into each and every one of us, using us, collectively, to recreate itself time and again in new and different manifestations, ad infinitum.

If we, as polyamorous people, truly want to empower others, we must recognize this internalized dominance for what it is, and end it.

To do that, we must get even closer to our kryptonite than we are now. Just as antidotes to snake bites are made from snake venom, we must now ingest some poison, because we are all already suffering. We have all already been poisoned by The System.

I pray I’ll be able to use my gift to empower you to survive what we’re about to do. I need you to take some poison with me now.

Repulsive Intimacy: Violence is not the opposite of intimacy

When I was a teenager, I ingested a poison that gave me an incredible power.

The poison I ingested was membership in the BDSM Scene, a social microcosm of deliberate erotic megalomania. The BDSM Scene is a sexuality subculture that bears some resemblance in structure, but not purpose, to the polyamory community: both are social systems; both are comprised of many people who are multiply privileged and multiply oppressed; both are ignorant of their own respective privileges, their superpowers, and their kryptonites.

Unlike the polyamory community, the BDSM Scene is an institution entirely devoted to the fetishization of oppression culture. Unlike the polyamory community, the BDSM Scene is a poison that is unrepentantly evil; its sole purpose is the eroticization of epistemic violence. Unlike the polyamory community, there is nothing redeemable about the BDSM Scene; its sole value is as a structure to be wholly and unapologetically resisted.

The power I derived from this poison is the ability to understand the distinction between something’s individual instance and the structural manifestation of that same thing. In the case of BDSM, understanding both the fact that there is a distinction between people’s BDSM activity and the culture of the BDSM Scene, as well as the fact that there is a relationship between people’s BDSM activity and the culture of the BDSM Scene, is key to understanding why the BDSM Scene-State is an unrepentant evil. Specifically, BDSM’s individualistic manifestation (like, “kinky, consensual sex”) gives people control over their engagement with violence, while its systemic manifestation reproduces The System’s epistemic violence without giving people an ability to consent to it. In other words:

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 [hacker theorist] McKenzie Wark’s phrasing, an abstraction—a double of a double.

My gift is the power to see failure, violence, and domination. What I see most often is epistemic pain and abuse. This power lets me perceive relationships between things that exist at different levels of scale; I have a kind of social-systemic x-ray vision.

Recently, I had the privilege of participating in KinkForAll Denver, an open-to-the-public “unconference” whose theme is sex and relationships education. In 2009, I co-founded KinkForAll with a long-term goal of developing “self-empowerment training areas” where people could choose to endure the intense challenge of putting themselves in an uncomfortable but not dangerous situation. KinkForAll is designed to encourage us to learn how to “move up” and claim our personal autonomy, our agency, and our power when we need to, and learn how to “move back” to respect others who share this home we call Earth.

KinkForAll is not designed to succeed, but rather to fail inexpensively. It is not designed as a safe space, but rather public space. It is not only designed to encourage us to “move up and move back,” but also to learn to say to and hear from one another, “How about you? Okay then, fuck off!”

I Work on KinkForAll because much of the world we live in is uncomfortable with and hostile toward education about intimacy. This enforced ignorance betrays itself through sexual stigmas that sustain an aristocratic stranglehold on information, privileging credentialed gatekeepers over the only true expert on your own desires: you! 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.

Just as sexual relationships are privileged over asexual ones, “lovey-dovey” relationships are privileged over (antagonistic) confrontational ones. Valid forms of “intimacy” are therefore only understood as the former, not the latter. Thankfully, BDSM complicates this inaccurate conflation of “intimacy” with “love.”

On page 174 of “Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy,” ethnographer Staci Newmahr writes:

The challenges in understanding intimacy parallel the problems in conceptualizing violence, pain, and eroticism. Trapped in moral frameworks and tethered to political agendas, these ideas are rarely deconstructed. SM forces us to confront the apparent inconsistencies and paradoxes contained within them. In doing so, we can trace conceptual links between intimacy, eroticism, and violence that move beyond psychological models of innate drives and pathologies.

In other words BDSM is unequivocally about violence, though trapped in contemporary moral frameworks, few BDSM’ers will admit to this. Newmahr continues:

Nonconsensual violence (what most people mean when they say “real violence”) transgresses physical, social, emotional, and ethical boundaries between actors. […] To violate, and to be violated, are intimate experiences. If we cease to reserve the word “intimate” for situations that are desirable or healthy, we can see, for example, the intimacy of violent crime. Rape, which many of us would shudder to consider “intimacy,” is so heinous precisely because it is so intimate.

Since rape is an abhorrent (violent) crime, and since the anti-SM feminist viewpoint has so thoroughly monopolized discourse regarding social values in all their myriad applications, accepting “violence” as being a potential part of “sex,” much less a potentially desirable and valuable facet of some consensual sexual activity, is believed even in pro-BDSM circles simply to be unconscionable. It is rejected out of hand, uncritically, without nary a shred of self-reflection; we who tout ourselves non-judgmental cowardly judge that which we value.

This is the point at which we can rupture BDSM itself. Such knee-jerk denialism, this self-defensive behavior, is evidence of a fractal boundary. This is the point at which we can violently disrupt things in order to see distinctions and observe relationships through multiple levels of scale.

In her works, Newmahr conceptualizes intimacy as “the experience of achieving access to protected aspects of others’ selves.” The value in Newmahr’s work is, in part, her emphasis on the violent disruption of morally-driven epistemic bondage. Those moral Systems are conceptual restraints shaming us for desiring experiences—rape fantasies, painful sensations like cutting or whipping, being physically bound—that are uncomfortable, but not dangerous. The System knows that if we felt free to choose discomfort as comfort, to choose pain as pleasure, to choose bondage as freedom, we could learn to use an instrument of liberation it must render obscure to survive: submission, and its powers.

In fact, a typical relationship with violence mirrors Abe and Belle’s “wrong turn on their way to forming an inclusive Poly-L Triad,” to borrow Mim’s words again. It’s the same reason why BDSM Scene’sters make the dire mistake of creating a divisive “kinky” and “vanilla” binary. Look at the process of thinking, one frame at a time:

1. Here’s Abe again.
2. Now, instead of Belle, we’ll use B to mean “BDSM,” a contextualized expression of violence.
3. As Abe develops an understanding of BDSM and a desire to explore it, a relationship is created between him and the conception of violence. Again, this relationship is represented as a line between the dots, and the structure is identical to what we’ve seen before: it’s a dyad.
4. Here’s Candy.
5. When Candy and Abe meet and start playing with BDSM together, a new relationship is created between them.

What happens next depends on their relationship to violence. If we succumb to The System’s morally-driven, epistemic bondage, there are only two possibilities:

• The less common situation is that Abe and Candy feel content in their relationship together and in their BDSM play, in which case they consider themselves “kinky” and each develop relationships to violence “as metamours” using an institution known as The BDSM Scene.
• More likely, however, Abe and Candy are disturbed by their desire to “do SM” play, or are repulsed by the only visible patterns of behavior for it, in which case they distance themselves from their relationship to violence, maintaining an ideological distance from anything “kinky,” and falling back into (the illusion of) a dyadic structure.

To continue replicating itself into the behavioral patterns of our people’s future generations, The System needs us to believe that there are exactly two options. Not one, not three, but two. Either:

• “resistance is futile”; this breeds apathy. To BDSM’ers, this laziness manifests in self-deceptions like “BDSM cannot be violence.”

Or:

• “resistance is conquest”; this breeds dominance. To BDSM’ers, this seems legible, and so they create social institutions—the BDSM Scene-State—for the explicit purpose of reproducing this very trait.

Some of us decide to adopt the former mindset, while others decide to adopt the latter. Either way, in so doing, The System has gotten us, at the scale of cliques, Scenes, and whole societies, to divide ourselves into binary groupings: the oppressed, and the privileged. As a result, one group believes “the other” is “irrational” precisely because the division itself is artificial!

Again, when we are confronted by a confusing reality that we do not understand, we too often succumb to the temptation of legibility. We “use authoritarian power to impose” our vision onto others. We repeat this same cycle of non-consensual domination. As I said during my seminar at Atlanta Poly Weekend 2011:

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.

Recall again the pattern of oppression, the DNA of evil itself: obscure, divide, conquer, homogenize. We are trapped in an omnipresent cycle of non-consensual violence, one so pervasive that there is no English word to describe the inexplicable total consumption such an influence has. Therefore, I simply call it “The Satisfaction.”

I beg each and every one of you listening to me speak—whether you’re listening to me in person today, or whether you’re watching a recording of me a day from now, a year from now, or a decade from now—I beg you, please, never let yourself succumb to The Satisfaction’s comfort, or pleasure, for these are lies, illusions conjured by The System, and they aim to forever impair your power.

We are almost there. We can now see The System and the parasitic hold it has on us from within our safest spaces. We must now learn how to sterilize, and overcome it.

What The System obscures is choice. The decision it offers us, futility or conquest, is not just a false dichotomy, although it is that, too. Regardless of the decision we make, if we succumb to its framing, its way of being, it will have gotten us to destroy the very essence of self-empowered choice.

This is the part you’ve been waiting for. This is where I’ll bite you on the neck where it hurts the most. This is when you claim your superpowers.

How to Choose Love: Inventing Our Powers

My knowledge of my power is derived, in large part, from my experiences in the BDSM Scene. To survive there,

I ruptured and reconstituted myself an intellisexual cyborg who thrived on the orgiastic exchange of conceptions rather than bodily fluids, a kind of idea-sex in which hyperlinks are sex toys. (Probably strap-ons.)

[…I]t is also no accident that I am a brutal critic of the BDSM Scene at this moment in history, nor that I would critique it using the lore of radical transparency, diversity, and accessibility—all gleaned from techno-privileged open sources. For all intents and purposes, I am the illegitimate offspring of The Scene and The State at a time when the literary telepathic non-magic of the Internet threatens them both.

“Sexual reproduction,” as socialist-feminist academic Donna Haraway wrote, “is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function of the system environment.” You see, you and I are being intimate in a way we may never have been before. I can see our ideas having sex with each other right now, right here, in the spaces between our bodies.

I am not just a man, nor just a submissive, nor just a human, nor just a Jew, nor just a person with bipolar disorder. Yes, I am all of those things. But I am also a blasphemous, illegitimate fusion of all these things mutated to the power of their number.

I have been unapologetically disloyal to my ancestors. Still borrowing from Haraway, “illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.”

So, too, must you be unfaithful to me to claim your power; you must choose disloyalty. It is a choice The System will never offer, because it wants you to make a decision between futility against it or conquest of it. Both those options coerce your loyalty to it; the decision itself is a dyadic structure.

But remember, language is a superpower. It turns the impossible into the possible. The word “choice” is defined as:

the right or ability to make […] a selection when faced with two or more possibilities.

Meanwhile, the word “decision” is defined as:

the action or process of deciding something or of resolving a question.

The root of the word “decide” is “cide,” meaning “to kill,” as in pesticide, homicide, and genocide. When we are coerced into making a decision, rather than empowered to make choices, what we are doing is killing possibilities. We are, in fact, being non-consensually violent to ideas; we are undermining the possibility of diversity.

How do you claim your power in the face of a System that coerces you to decide between two options? Remember, The System needs us to believe that there are exactly two options. Either:

• “resistance is futile,” breeding apathy, or
• “resistance is conquest,” breeding dominance.

What can you do if you want to reject both futility and conquest? Choose a third possibility:

• “resistance is submission.”

Although BDSM’ers are quick to claim knowledge of power, they are extraordinarily ignorant of its diversity, just as polyamorous people are quick to claim knowledge of intimacy yet remain largely ignorant of its diverse formulations—such as the intimacy of violation. The BDSM Scene-State is a social structure designed to seduce people into believing that dominance is a strength. This is a clever lie, kept hidden from BDSM’ers by the way they discuss BDSM, themselves.

It sounds too simple, too obvious, to have any meaning, but this is the single most important lesson I’ve learned about relationships.

Dominance—like whiteness, maleness, straightness, and sanity—is a structure of domination; there is nothing redeemable or reformed about dominance. The inverse of that statement is equally important to articulate: submission is a choice to endure violence. Contrary to the BDSM Scene’s rhetoric, submission is not a gift given, but a power taken.

Choosing to submit to oppression, to endure violence, is a power with which we can sterilize The System. In choosing to submit, we neutralize dominance because we are neither resigning ourselves to its domination nor seeking to dominate it in response. Dominance, a manifestation of pure evil, cannot be dominated, for any attempt to overpower it strengthens it anew.

We cannot excise The System from ourselves, as we are already infested. But we can stop it from reproducing within us, and subsequently infesting our many offspring. And polyamory’s superpower is the key.

I am a child of the BDSM Scene-State; I am a villain. You are members of the polyamory community; you could be heroes.

Be A Hero: Make Triadic Relationships

Let’s return to Abe, Belle, and Claire, and see if we can give them the power they need to have triadic relationships.

When we left them, Abe had just met Claire, creating a relationship that changed everyone’s structural position in relation to each other. This disruption opened the door for Belle and Claire to be coerced into relating to one another “as metamours” by invisible poly-cultural scripts that decreed how metamours should think, feel, and behave towards one another. In other words, expecting “positive” feelings, such as love, between metamours is an artifact of couple privilege.

From the perspective of a person who’s an only-or-mostly-secondary, hearing “You’ll really like your metamour…” often contains an unspoken, even unintended, threat: “…or else.” The threat isn’t coming from Abe, but from the institution of metamours, similar to the way divorce is a threat to marriage. But being metamours is actually worse than being married because instead of being threatened with metaphorical divorce by one person, there are two people who can choose to end your relationships—and neither of them are you.

Instead of imposing a direct relationship between metamours, which immediately creates a new dyad and replicates dyadism in all its manifestations, we need to learn how to have triadic relationships.

In structural terms, triadic relationships are simply connections between two terminals and an apex wherein the apex mediates the relationship the terminals have with one another. In simpler words: a triadic relationship is one that involves three components, wherein one component is the relationship itself. Yet another way to put it is that a triadic relationship is one in which the relationship you have to some other entity is triangulated through a third party.

Let’s walk through this one piece at a time, mindful that it’s actually all happening simultaneously:

• As before, we begin with a vee comprised of Abe, Belle, and Claire.
• A vee is composed of two dyads.
• From Belle’s perspective:
  • one of the three pieces of her triadic relationship with Claire is the dyadic relationship between herself and Abe;
  • another of the three pieces is Claire’s relationship with Abe;
  • the last of the three pieces is her own relationship to the relationship between Abe and Claire. This is the critical piece of the puzzle; using this last piece, Belle’s relationship to Claire is triangulated through Abe.
• Reciprocally, from Claire’s perspective:
  • One of the three pieces is the dyadic relationship between herself and Abe,
  • another of the three pieces is Belle’s relationship with Abe,
  • and the last of the three pieces is her own relationship to the relationship between Abe and Belle. Again, this is the critical piece that allows Claire to triangulate her relationship to Belle through Abe.

None of this precludes the possibility that Belle and Claire might want to have a relationship that does create a dyadic structure. However, by avoiding the trap of centering their experience to one another as a coupled pair, Belle and Claire remain free to choose whatever types of intimacies they’d like their relationships to have—even violent confrontation—without threatening their relationship with Abe and without destroying the other’s possibility of a relationship with him.

Triadic relationships do not make “polyamorous” relationships, wherein relations between people are based on self-imposed, imagined contractual obligations policed by cultural norms. Rather, they are anarchic relationships, wherein relations between people are mediated solely by the self-empowered choices of the people involved. This is what relationships free from authoritarian power look like.

Frankly, hierarchical relationships are bullshit. Ironically, the gift the polyamory movement, as a movement, can offer the rest of the world is the power to access anarchic relationships, because the polyamory movement understands conceptual structure. Moreover, this gift is a power even monogamous people can use, too; that invariability is how we know it’s polyamory’s superpower!

The Three Keys to Triadic Relationships

Fittingly, there are three keys to sustaining our ability to have triadic relationships.

First, realize that relationships are a performance of roles, not a structural position. You can think of relationships as a kind of drag. Two married people can perform the relationship roles of “husband” and “wife” if they so choose, but they can also choose to play the role of best friends, “pet” and “owner,” or partners in crime.

Like a gender role, a relationship role has certain expectations carried over from cultural institutions. Such tropes are like society’s window dressing for relationships. There’s nothing wrong with choosing to play a particular role at a particular time; what’s wrong is telling or being told which role to play, when, and with whom.

The beauty in understanding relationships as drag performance is that you can put on and take off some given relationship dressing at will. For instance, with Mish, I sometimes play the role of “teenage girlfriend.” Other times, she does. Our relationship is richer and more expressive thanks to our ability to perform a given relationship drag some of the time, and some other drag at other times.

Second, recognize that relationships, themselves, are fractal boundaries. In other words, the structure of a relationship is, itself, a triadic relationship! Another way to say this is that the structure of a single relationship, or line on a relationship graph, is actually a vee in which the relationship itself is the apex. Further, this structure extends to every level of scale, ad infinitum.

This means that people in a couple actually have a metamoric relationship to each other by virtue of their relationship’s triadic relationship. The System is so good at obscuring the effects of dyadism that, to the best of my knowledge, this basic fact about relationship structure itself remained hidden to the most vocal polyamory educators and activists.

Now that you can see what The System is doing, start looking at the charts of your intimate networks with an understanding that the lines themselves are also first-class nodes.

Thirdly, value the whole of the diversity of intimacy, not just the comfortable intimacies. Love is an intimacy, and so is hate. Fear is an intimacy, and so is curiosity. Empathy is an intimacy, and so is antipathy.

Now that you have the power to see the world in triadic relationships, you can deconstruct intimacy itself. When you do, you’ll find another fractal boundary. You’ll see that intimacy has nothing to do with a specific kind of interaction, but is, instead, a relationship—and a triadic one, at that!

Intimacy is, itself, the relationship between influence and risk. That knowledge is such great power.

You are polyamorous people. You do not need to fear confrontation, or discomfort, or jealousy, or love, or hate. You do not even need to fear fear, itself.

We are polyamorous people. We are superheroes.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Last Saturday, February 25^th, 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:

• Out of 46 sessions, KFANYC1 had 25 BDSM-centric sessions, and many of these were explicitly play related. (See, for instance “Suturing 101,” “Basic Rope,” “Seven Piercing Disasters,” and so on.) That’s 54.34%.
• Out of 42 sessions, KFANYC2 had 17 BDSM-centric sessions. That’s 40.47%.
• Out of 28 sessions, KFABOS had 14 BDSM-centric sessions. That’s 50%.
• Out of 14 sessions, KFASF had 5 BDSM-centric sessions. That’s 35.71%.

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. And here’s a screenshot.

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 [now public] 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

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 25^th, 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.

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 31^st, 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 6^th, 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.

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.

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.

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:

• Dreaming of Compassion: Technology, Polyamory, and Social Justice keynote presentation as a ZIP archive.
• Dreaming of Compassion: Technology, Polyamory, and Social Justice keynote presentation as a PDF document.
• Dreaming of Compassion: Technology, Polyamory, and Social Justice keynote presentation as a text transcript.

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.

EDITORIAL NOTE: The following is a rush transcript of my Arse Elektronika 2011: Screw the System talk. The conference, which focused on the intersection between sex, technology, and class, and which has been thought-provoking every year I’ve attended, did not disappoint. I was posting updates through most of the conference with the #Arse2011 hashtag, and all of the talks got audio recorded. They will eventually be available from Monochrom.

I wanted to start by pointing out this quote by Antonio Negri:

Nothing is richer or finer than to be able to connect the immediate needs of individuals to the political needs of the class.

On that note, thank you to Johannes for putting this conference together.

[Applause.]

And also to Robert and Carol for hosting this space. I want to make sure I give them honor and homage, too, for allowing us to do this here. So this year’s Arse Elektronika is “Screw the System.” And, on that note I also want to thank the previous speakers who came before me, particularly the ones who were talking about the various perceptions of social constructs.

You guys are a group of people whose minds are irrepressible. You people present ideas at places like this, and hopefully in the work you do elsewhere as well, that help create a kind of psychological liberty—a kind of space for possibility in the mind. This is really, really important. You guys are rebels of today and possible prophets of the future.

Now, in contrast to that, we have “The Man.” We have “The System.” The System wishes to maintain the status quo; they encourage stagnation. And how does that work? Class. Okay, so, class generally. What is class? That’s what we’re here to talk about.

High class. Low class. What class are you in? What is your first class? When was your second class? Do you like your class mates? Can you mate cross-class? What makes you feel like a second-class citizen? Are you working class? Are you working in class? Did you even go to class today? Classy.

So, when I come to talk about this topic, you’ll have to forgive me because this is not a topic I can talk about dispassionately. And so I’m going to change the tone a little bit.

When I began to think about it, I went first to the mathematics definition, which is a set of things that are kept separate from another set of things. Now, in social contexts, social classes are also very intricately intertwined with the idea of social power. When I started thinking about that, I started to look at the work of Max Weber, who was a German sociologist and political economist in the very early 1900′s.

And he thought of class—he created this theory academically called the “three component-theory of stratification” or more commonly known as Weberian Stratification—that was founded upon these two different positions of power. On the one hand you have the possession of power, and this depends on the control of certain social resources. And [on the other], you have the exercise of power, or the ability to get one’s way, often regardless of potential opposition. So, together, the possession and exercise of power—again, social resources—conflagrate this ability to get what one wants.

So now when we talk about the sphere of sexuality, we often talk about the idea of sexual empowerment. And I think no one put this better than Kristen Stubbs, actually, when she talked about sexual empowerment from making toys. She said,

I don’t believe that off-the-shelf sex toys or equipment can meet everyone’s needs. Commercial products also tend to be very expensive, so DIY alternatives can help to make toys more accessible. Promoting technological empowerment for sexuality and pleasure is about enabling people to build and modify objects around them so they can have the kinds of experiences that they want to have.

It’s a pretty basic idea, right? You should get to have the kind of experiences you want to have. So, sexual empowerment is the ability to have the sexual experiences that one wants. Kitty [Stryker] talked about this very eloquently just recently.

Now let’s talk about that in the context of the BDSM Scene.

Now, when I say “The Scene,” I have to be very specific. I’m saying capital-T, capital-S, “The Scene.” Specifically, I’m talking about the semipublic, pansexual, often middle-class and privileged “public” BDSM Scene. In her paper, Working at Play: BDSM Sexuality in the San Francisco Bay Area, Margot Weiss defines that as such:

“Pansexual” is a term used by the SM community to describe organizations, spaces and scenes that are open to, used by, or include people of various sexual and gender orientations. In practice, the “pansexual community” in San Francisco usually means the community of practitioners who join and participate in organizations like Society of Janus and SM Odyssey, take classes and workshops in places like QSM, attend munches, and semipublic play parties, and otherwise participate in the formally organized scene[…]. In general, the men are, in the majority, heterosexual, the women are bisexual and heterosexual, and there are a fair number of transgendered practitioners and professional dominants of various orientations.

Now, [Weiss wrote] an ethnography, so she interviewed a bunch of individuals. And what I want to call out here is:

In total, I interviewed 51 practitioners: 27 men and 24 women (including two transgendered women). Their average age was 41, they were 87% white and most were involved in long-term relationships: 25% were married, and 38% were partnered. Of my female interviewees, 50% were bisexual, 29% were lesbian, and 15% were heterosexual[…]. Of my male interviewees, 59% were heterosexual, 26% were bisexual, and 15% were gay. Almost all of my interviewees would be considered middle class, based on education, profession, and income; 26% worked in the computer or tech industry, more than any other category of employment, including “other.”

So, before we get too much further it’s really key to understand this particular distinction. That when I talk about The Scene I’m specifically talking about this community of people whether they are in San Francisco or elsewhere. They have formalized structures, which I call the capital-S Scene. You can think of this—you can ask yourself some questions to see how closely associated you are with this particular group. For example:

• How many hours a week do you spend on, say FetLife and/or in BDSM email lists (discussion lists about the topic)?
• How many and which BDSM, Leather, or Scene organizations are you involved with? Do you belong to?
• What percentage of your social life would you consider to be connected to that community, to The Scene?
• How much money do you estimate do you regularly spend on BDSM-related events, or equipment, or things like that: toys, services, etc.?

It is okay if you do or do not. :)

Another way to look at it is to look around right now. Who do you not see here? I don’t see a lot of dark-skinned people, Black people. Some—only two. Disproportionately few. I don’t see a lot of people with disabilities. I don’t see a lot of “poor” people. People who could not come because this [conference] has a price tag. It’s a low price tag, which is worth congratulating you [Johannes] for but it still has a monetary cost. I know people who couldn’t be here today because they could not afford the $25 to get in the door.

Now, I’m going to talk specifically about—well, let’s mention this: look at my skin color, look at my gender presentation, which is worth noting also, that I’m not in those categories, that I’m able-bodied, etc.—but let’s put all that aside. Instead, I’m going to talk about submissive masculinity and the submissive masculine, because that’s what I most know.

In The Scene, there is a shared culture, shared news outlets, shared informational outlets, and harkening back to Adam’s talk yesterday for those who were there, this is very much like a nation-state. The collection of people for whom that realm comprises the majority of their social existence live in that particular kind of nation-state. I call this The Scene-State. Capital-S, capital-S.

The Scene-State. It is an imagined community. And like any other modern society, it enforces social control on its citizens in particular ways. And that’s what I’m really interested in.

When we think about how that happens, we can again look to Max Weber and his theory of Weberian Stratification. In it, he also discusses three individual components that comprise that kind of social control. He talks about “wealth,” which is the access to material resources, typically thought of as financial. Now, confusingly, he calls this “Class,” which is unfortunate terminology. He talks about power, more formally, political power. He calls this “Party.” And he talks about “Stande”, or Status—social status—and these things are like, “What is your gender presentation? How does that affect you socially?” We talked a lot about that already earlier [in this conference], I’m not going to go over it again.

But this can be mapped almost directly, I think, to the BDSM Scene where “wealth,” for example, is big toybags. Or leathers; the right boots. Power and Party is your Scene affiliation. How many organizations are you a part of? Are you on the Boards of any organizations? What decision making power do you have in those organizations? What political clout does that give you?

And Status? Role orientation. Top? Dom? Sub? Bottom? Femme? Masculine presenting? Now, that’s what I want to focus on because this is, of course, a class analysis of social status in the BDSM Scene. This gets very complicated because of the intersectionalities that are affected by it but the most salient way to talk about it is talk about something called domism, which is the prejudicing against submissive-identified individuals or bottom-identified individuals and towards the normalizing experiences of dominants. And Thomas Millar over at Yes Means Yes is probably the most eloquent on the topic.

He calls this “role essentialism and sexism intersectionality in the BDSM Scene.” (It’s a highly, highly recommended read.) And, basically, he calls it [out as]:

[S]ocial structures within a sexual community that privilege dominants and devalue submissives outside of explicitly negotiated power exchanges. This takes a lot of forms, among them the pathologizing of bottoms and subs; and non-play role-policing and presumption. […] What these prejudices amount to is a normalizing and centering of the experience of the dominant in The Scene.

And this is not just his say-so, it’s not just my say-so, there are numerous ethnographies, like Playing on the Edge by Staci Newmahr (a really, really good book) that talk about exactly this. And people have experienced these kinds of prejudices on an extraordinarily regular basis. In this book, Newmahr writes on page 79:

The most ubiquitous example posits assertiveness as inconsistent with submission. Once, when I articulated a point in a heated conceptual debate, a member of the group asked me whether I was sure I was a submissive. Another time I asked a companion (a top-identified man) to order my coffee while I went to the restroom, prompting another person at the table to exclaim, “Hey, I thought you were a sub!”

So, this is—this can be taken as a bunch of anecdotes from an individual perspective, but if we zoom out to the perspective of the “nation-state,” to see how the nation-state “sees” things, right, how the Scene-State views this, you can see this mirrored in a lot of ways. One of the biggest intersections is the privileging of the dominant experience as an expression of masculinity, so that masculinity itself becomes the way to express dominance, which is obviously frustrating for submissive men like me—and for dominant women, and for anyone who doesn’t match into these boxes. There’s an enormous number of cultural scripts and tropes that we can ascribe to in order to get that kind of presentation to be acknowledged.

But what I want to show you is a prototypical example of how this relates to [social class dynamics]. I run a website called MaleSubmissionArt.com. And here’s a picture that I posted on it—looks pretty tame. And I saw this as a very loving and sensuous photograph. And […] I said here, “tame photo…young couple…struck a chord in me.” […] I saw love.

And here’s what someone else said. Same exact image, pixel for fucking pixel. And here’s their interpretation of the image: “Silly boy. I may let you serve me but I’ll never love you. Is that enough?” And he says, “Yes, Mistress.”

It’s the contrast in these two things, it’s the contrast in the context, not the image, but in the surrounding marketing material in this that pisses me off. Because this is all I get most of the time when I look at porn, or when I look at sexual expression of any kind that tries to present itself as for—and made—made for me.

One of the interesting things about Male Submission Art was that it was specifically an online project. It allowed me to disentangle my embodiment with my expressions. I didn’t look a certain way, I didn’t act a certain way, and I “always pass on the Internet.” And I was able […] essentially to treat the Internet like a way to get that kind of idea and get that different presentation and that different context out into the minds of other people. It was like—to appropriate some technological terminology—it was like “impregnating The Scene’s spaces with cybernetic replication where other people’s minds,” I wrote in a post very angry about this very topic, “other people’s minds offered pre-sequenced cultural genetic material, instruments to engineer a more humane culture.”

So what I did was project my persona so thoroughly up there, on the Internet, that I forgot about being a corporeal being. To get the fucking ideas out there, to make the space in people’s minds where something like that was possible and acceptable.

This does not just affect men, or submissives, it affects pretty much everybody in various ways. Here’s a great post by Adele Haze talking about Kink, Inc.’s marketing phraseology. And one of the things she wrote about here was just taking a bunch of examples of the porn-maker’s way of selling their material:

“Sexy MILF is bound, stripped, and made to carry a mattress through the city so everyone can see what a huge whore she is!”

And then she makes some very, very poignantly sarcastic [and] quite funny remarks about that, for example:

“Tea Blondie gets fucked on the street by BIG BLACK COCK!!!” (OMG, disembodied enthnically-specific cock!)

The thing that was very good about this post, I thought, is that she called out the community of people who support this as being surprised that in their latest incarnation, a particular incident with Niki Blue’s “virginity” press release, as being surprised that this kind of stuff went on! From Kink, Inc.! Oh my god! As if it was some kind of shock. As if they hadn’t been reading this and consuming this all the goddamn time already. Every day that is the presentation. It would only shock somebody, right, if they were surprised that that could be possible. Why don’t people notice that more fully? Didn’t shock me. And it didn’t shock a lot of other people either. But few people in the community, in the Scene-State, had much to say about it.

So this presents women, for the most part, or submissive men on the other part, as worthless people. But we are not worthless individuals, we are very valuable people and the sexualities that we have are also important and valuable and highly subversive and very, very useful. We’re not “poor” people, we are rich people. And so that’s why a lot of people are very angry—very angry—at this constant refrain.

Now if you ask Scene people to fix this, they won’t, because they benefit from the rotten status quo. The fundamental issue to recognize is that people who are community leaders—and I use Kink, Inc. as an example but there are many; we can use the TES Board of Directors or any of the other organizations as well—the thing to recognize is that these Scene-State figureheads, these so-called leaders of the community, are plutocratic vampires. They are vampires because they suck the emotional vitality out of the people. They’re a phalanx of dishonest and untrustworthy people who use the instruments of Scene-State power specifically to enrich themselves—they are cronies—and exclude everybody else. Where do they get these riches? By creating wealth and social opportunities? By creating these sexual opportunities? No. They rake it off the backs of individuals like Mr. Cellophane, who you will never see: people whose only pattern for BDSM play is the fetishizing of lovelessness and exploitation that I showed you in that prototypical example. That’s not wealth creation. That’s wealth redistribution—up, towards them, towards the higher classes.

Any positive representation including simply representations, i.e., visibility, not invisibility—existing representations—is a valuable resource. It’s made scarce specifically to the most intersectionally underprivileged populace. I mentioned some of them earlier: people with disabilities, people of colour, submissive men, in this particular example. Where is fat-positive imagery? Look around you! Look here!

The Center for Sex and Culture is pretty good, generally. But still, where are the fat-positive imagery? Pictures like this: Wheelchair Worship. Where’s that? It’s never gonna be in FetLife’s Kinky & Popular feed.

[…]

So, to understand resources you have to understand poverty. Poverty: in her seminal work, Ruby K. Payne wrote—”A Framework for Understanding Poverty”—she wrote, “poverty is an extent to which an individual does without resources.” And specifically, she wrote that resources are typically thought of as financial resources but that’s just one kind of resource that people have. It’s the very obvious one, but there are also emotional resources; being able to choose and control emotional responses, especially responses to negative things. Mental resources. Spiritual resources. Physical resources. Support systems—whether institutional, or social. Knowledge of hidden rules is a resource that she notes. Knowledge of hidden rules is like the customs of a particular group of people. How do you pass in a social group? You have to have an understanding of how to work the iPad if you’re gonna pretend to be a businessman [in the middle-upper class]. But also things like, what’s the level of noise you’re used to? Poor spaces are typically very noisy and crowded. And one needs solitude and quiet to think, says Chris Hedges. It’s an important thing because the higher class you go, the more space you have, more mental and physical space you have.

And then she also talks about relationships and role models as a resource. Now, on relationships and role models, she says, “All individuals have role models.” I showed you a role model for a submissive guy—that I hated.

All individuals have role models. The question is the extent to which the role model is nurturing or appropriate. Can the role model parent? Work successfully? Provide a gender role for the individual? It is largely from role models that a person learns how to live life emotionally.

Dominant men have role models, too. Many of them talk a lot about that to me. One guy […] a 38-year-old self-identified dominant man goes to a lot of Kink [Inc.] parties, has lots of good memories there, and he says that Kink was wonderful for him, the company, because he:

…saw manifested what was always going on in my own head, which I was ashamed and scared of, and I saw that it could be done in an ethical and consensual manner.

Which is awesome.

I didn’t even recognize that I was dominant or sadistic until I saw James Mogul patterning a way to do that. Once I did, I could avail myself of the great educational opportunities that are all around us here [the Bay Area], but without it, I would likely have remained someone who thought BDSM was for people who inexplicably needed props for sex.

And then he says:

…and in true trickle-down fashion, that is why we champion it to others.

It: the education, The Scene. All sounds good. It is good that he has role models. Where are mine? Where are yours? For the most part, our iconography, the thing that is supposed to represent people like me are primarily objects of ridicule or scorn or derision—in both the overculture and the Scene-State. If we exist at all, of course.

Every time I walk into spaces I take little tallies of the images. Mission Control, June 11th: 22 women to 1 man. September 3rd: 29 women to 3 men. Image tally, SF Citadel, September 27th: 24 women, 1 man. Image tally, Wicked Grounds, July 13th: 17 women to 5 men. August 15th: 10 women to 1 man (the full numbers were 20 to 2). We are literally invisible for the most part, and it kind of reminds me of this: a comic about an “invisibility cloak”.

One could ask, “Well, what’s going on here? Why is that happening?” And, one way to think about this is not just the matter of what makes us invisible, but also what keeps us invisible? So, imagine, for example, marketing a cell phone to a homeless mom. How would you go about doing that? There’s no market for that because they’re not going to have any money to pay for your cell phone so you’re not going to figure out how to build the best homeless phone. And so, I’m gonna borrow from Alisa, actually, when she says:

This idea is interesting to me because it turns the tables on access. As much as the under served population doesn’t have access to helpful tools, designers, researchers and business people don’t have access to those populations.

How does a researcher go to a homeless mom and ask about what the best cell phone is? Where do they find those people? They’re living on the margins already so they’re difficult to see. An analogy, for example, could be food deserts: if rich people only build markets where they are, where are poor people gonna eat? (See also: Food deserts.) If only engineers who drive cars build highways, where are people who don’t drive cars gonna cross the fucking highway?

Okay, bringing this back to sex. In her article, “Perverting Visual Pleasure: Representing Sadomasochism,” Eleanor Wilksinson wrote on what she calls the “Paradox of Visibility.” On the one hand, it’s good to be visible, we want visibility, representation, etcetera. On the other hand, she writes:

Queer politics has often assumed that increased publicity automatically leads to increased acceptance, that to make a change to the ‘hetero-normative’ world order we need to take to the streets, to make our sexual practices visible[…]. However, this equation is often overly simplistic[…]; with increased visibility comes the risk of increased hostility too[…].

Fistandantilus, for example, that dominant guy, was very angry at me, ultimately. He asked why I didn’t kill myself.

We must be constantly aware that there is a very real danger of a parallel ‘SM-normativity’, in which certain (capitalist and consumerized) conceptions of SM become the norm. Already the mainstreaming of SM has led to a heteropatriarchal version of SM becoming dominant. With increased visibility there is also a danger we can begin to mistake the representation of SM for SM itself – that this is how it should and always will be. What is therefore needed is a space in which to make public a number of continuously contrasting and conflicting SM stories.

[…]

Without any publicity, minoritized sexual cultures cannot challenge and change mainstream stereotypes.

Now, Wilkinson was talking about The Scene in contrast to the vanilla world, right, the over-arching hegemony. But the same holds true for inside the Scene-State itself. Exactly the same thing holds true, again. It’s a fractal boundary. It works in very much the same way.

And it’s not just me, in fact. Here’s an example that I found really, really, really recently about people calling themselves D and M. Just two bloggers that I found, and their coming out story to BDSM is very interesting. D writes—sorry, M writes:

D’s little post about facesitting reminded me of how all this first started about two and a half years ago. We’d been dating for over a year, and we’d just started getting into male-dominated kink. Looking back, that was kind of… silly. I was still in denial about being bisexual, and about being dominant, so that combined with a week of erotic dreams after reading the Story of O made me think I wanted to be dominated. Like I said, silly.

By the way, Story of O poster, right there [on the wall in this room].

The thing was that I spent most of the time topping from the bottom. D was a sub just playing at being dominant and basically that meant I got exactly what I wanted with a pair of handcuffs and some dirty talk. Which, at the time, suited me just fine.

What set me off was the one night we were having a little playtime with an old Halloween costume of mine, and I was desperate to have my pussy eaten. D, however, was just plain horny, and wasn’t going to. At the time, I was wearing a leash and collar…

That’s right. I’m gonna let that sink in. She was wearing a leash and collar.

…and I surprised us both when I bound his hands with the leash and sat on his face until I was satisfied. Very suddenly a regular Friday night for us turned into my first dominant encounter. It was thrilling and exciting and deeply satisfying.

I’d like to say I never looked back, but I am still working on getting through all the baggage that blocked my dominant aspect in the first place. It’s complicated, but my little slut makes it soooo worth it.

Good for them.

The point here is that they were patterning what they saw first, which is totally acceptable and fine and not a bad thing in and of itself. But when it didn’t work for them, thank god they found ways to actually find something that did. And what if they didn’t? Who gets left out when there are no representations that work? They’re lucky and that is a difficult hurdle for many people to overcome.

As an example, I entered The Scene when I was 18 in New York City as a switch. And I do, sometimes, have a feeling like I would have fun topping, and I have so thoroughly felt disrespected for being a bottom, and a submissive that I said, fuck topping, I’m gonna do this. Maybe I’m a contrarian to some n-th degree, I don’t know. But it was so important for me—now, it is so important for me now to accept this for who I am today, that topping is not even in my head. And that fact also pisses me off. Because I should be able to be free enough—maybe I have to make myself free enough in some woo-woo way—to want and have that, too. And I can’t get over that, yet. Cuz, y’know, no one’s perfect; I’m not perfect.

There’s an interesting point about representation. When I was given pre-publication access to a post a friend of mine was writing about representation, she had given—who’s also here—she had given me access to take a look at the post. And one of the dominant-identified, heterosexual cismale tops who she had also given access to for his perspective, said, “I don’t know if this really makes sense. Y’know, I can name a dozen prominent submissive men in The Scene, and only, like, y’know, four or five in the inner circles of the Kink, Inc. sanctums.” And so I challenged him and I said, “Well, please name these prominent submissive men.” And he came back and he named four, one of which was “maymay”—he didn’t realize he was talking to me—

[Audience laughter.]

One of which “wasn’t around anymore,” his words. And the remaining two both [actually] self-identify as switches. So, this is not a surprise, I said, “Okay, that is 1 actually, not twelve. So, you’re either counting wrong, or what you thought of was ‘non-dominant’ men.” Which is a valid thing to think about but not the same. And what’s interesting to me about the not the same is that we have so many specializations now, right, this continued specialization of sexuality, as Ella was talking about earlier [today], created these incredibly segmented populaces which for some reason we’ve taken on to an n-th degree of essentialism as though that’s what’s important to be. And I suffer from that now, too. See also ‘used to identify as a switch.’

So with no role models, how do submissive men play? How do we learn to play? When children grow, and when animals in their little nests are biting one another’s ears, they’re not actually biting one another’s ears, they’re gonna figure out how to hunt. Well, what is our version of that without role models? What is the Ludic circle in which this can be safe for us?

So, back to the ethnographies, cuz these are really good. On social status, as an overview, Newmahr writes:

Through the acquisition and demonstration of specialized skills, the members of this community achieve social and interpersonal status. The paths to status, moreover, are clear and unambiguous; if members play well and get involved, they are all but guaranteed a high status in the community. In turn, this status confers desirability as a play partner, which is experienced by some as sexual romantic desirability.

[…]

Framing SM as a serious leisure pursuit shifts the focus away from the ultimately unhelpful questions about whether SM is or is not deviant sex, and allows us to understand SM as, most fundamentally, social behavior.

That’s really important. […] Play kinda becomes both labour in the capitalist sense, and capital, in the capitalist sense. It kinda looks like this: there’s an economy that goes on in The Scene, and it sort of looks like this. And I apologize, again, for not having the best presentation of this here. […] This is very crude. So what I call the BDSM Scene-State work-play economy looks something like this. And again, it’s reductive, all frameworks are.

We have, at A, playing or scening. Now, we’ll dig into this more in just a bit. Weiss in 2006, again, in “Working at Play” discusses this concept very, very articulately, how labour is a kind of play in The Scene. If you play, you earn status, or what Weber called Stande, as a player, if the play is good. Newmahr talks a little about this. Playing confers social capital, but you can also get social capital by volunteering at local events, hosting play parties, teaching workshops, being recognized, being notable. I should point myself out as someone who has social capital by being upset about all this.

[Audience laughter.]

That earns you access to play, which is its own capital. Right? You can get, for example—these things can be tangible—like invitations to parties, discounts to events and things like that, access to conferences, especially if you’re speaking at them. And that, of course, leads to more play, which leads to the attainment of more status, and on and on and on the cycle goes.

Now, you can enter this cycle in one of two main ways. You can sort of start at point A. You’re more likely to start at point A, by playing, if you’re conventionally attractive, if you’re female-identified, and if you’re a bottom, and especially if those things all line up. And you’re more likely to start at C if you’re less conventionally attractive, male-identified or presenting, or a top.

Let’s go into play a little bit, because play is widely misunderstood from this sort of class perspective, but it’s really important, especially when it comes to social classes. Play itself is classed in The Scene. Right? Different kinds of play are “heavier” or “harder,” more expert, and there are some valid reasons for this. It can be harder to do, technically, and so technical skill becomes a kind of very specific capital resource. And by capital resource I specifically mean social capital resource.

Again, Weiss is really articulate around this, and she writes, on the notion of play as capital:

As BDSM has become more mainstream, more organizationally focussed and more middle-class, practitioners work on their SM in self-conscious ways, mobilizing American discourses of self-improvement, actualization and education.

See also techniques and skills and classes and workshops and all that stuff. But it’s also re-combinative, play is also not just a way to enjoy oneself recreationally but it’s also re-creating the kinds of social contracts that we’re able to have with one another. And, again, Ella talked about this really well earlier. And as such, it becomes its own kind of alibi for power exchanges. Because you’ve created that particular kind of Ludic circle that you can actually enjoy, in a safe way, that kind of relationship with somebody else.

Access to play, on the other hand, is a form of capital. And Newmahr is particularly poignant about this. On, I’m sorry, on playing first:

[M]uch of the appeal of topping is the sense of efficacy, the observable and immediate response of a bottom contributes significantly to the enjoyment of play by tops. Most tops consider themselves “reaction junkies.” A bottom who moans, yelps, screams, laughs, wriggles, and writhes, is thus more desirable than one who is stoic during play, all else being equal.

And just for a moment, I’m gonna tangent into: and why are men who bottom specifically supposed to be stoic, then? What is with the silent men? They’re taught that, as a pattern, even to their own detriment. Fuckers.

Secondly, bottoms with a high pain tolerance allow for more creativity and less tentativeness on the part of the top. […B]ottoms who are edgy or extreme in their SM activity tend to have higher social status than those who are not. For the same reason as outlined above, bottoms who have fewer limits provide their partners with more possibilities, and often the opportunity to engage in play in which most others are uninterested.

So, tops achieve status through skills, techniques, etcetera.

On access to play, this comes back to the volunteerism, over on that side. Status as a volunteer, to enter the Scene’s work-play economy that way:

[It's] particular advantageous for people who top. Because of safety concerns, novices who bottom have less difficulty finding play partners than those who top. This results in faster access to status through play for bottoms, but also serves to track tops as volunteers. Volunteerism can result in increased access to play, which helps to mitigate the disadvantage tops face on the path to status in the community. It also contributes to an imbalance between tops and bottoms at the level of community leadership. Because most participants want to play soon after they enter the scene, and because bottoms do not need to become involved in order to obtain play, the result is the cultivation of tops as community leaders far more frequently than bottoms.

When was the last time you saw a presentation by a bottom for a bottom? And, in comparison, how many presentations by tops for tops (for those of you who are in such spaces)?

Okay, so, when we think about Weberian Stratification as a way to segment a populace within The Scene, we can see people who have access to lots of play, equipment, etc., have one component of high status. People who are dominants and tops tend to have another [component of] status, their Stande, their role orientation, and of course their Party or political affiliations, that’s another. So, then, people like the ones who are at—the ones who have, when coupled to the volunteerism and tracking tops as community leaders, you have typically (in so-called “pansexual” communities) dominant men who are white and able-bodied and community leaders and they have decision making roles in roles like [being on] the TES Board, at places like the Society of Janus, and Kink, Inc. as well. James Mogul was dominant guy yet ran Men In Pain for god knows how many years. So these are high-class individuals. […] High-class, also called the bourgeois if you wanna go all academic.

Then you have the proletariat, the working class, these are Scene regulars and so forth. And then this question comes up: who’s left back? Who’s wearing the invisible cloak? So, okay, examples of this, right?

Let’s look at how this play economy works in The Scene. And again, I’m using Kink, Inc. as an example but there are many others. Kink, Inc. is just very visible and also a good example because people like talking about them and then I get a lot of attention for having talked about them, which is really important for getting this fucking idea out there.

As an example, Kink, Inc.’s parties, especially The Upper Floor parties have free entry to community members. They syphon the community itself to play, generating labour, which then literally transforms into capital. Literally! And if you’re not getting paid, you’re not the customer, you’re a product. It kind of reminds me of Facebook. Like, really like Facebook. Like, that Facebook.

Now, I should clarify, it’s not “wrong” to do that. You have an opportunity to play? Good! Go! Have a blast! I’m talking about the systemics here. I’m not talking about your individual experience. I’m not talking about your particular experience. I’m talking about the way this reinforces itself, the way this system reinforces itself. It’s very fucking capitalist.

It’s also corrupt.

Now, you don’t really have to take my word on all of this. I wanna show you this example by Fleur De Li who wrote about her experience at a Kink, Inc. gangbang:

All of the guests began to ascend the stairs towards the Upper Floor. […] We were told to help ourselves to Red Wine, White Wine or Champagne. […] Shelly said that it was her understanding that the guests could participate if they so chose. She said that she had no interest in joining in, she just wanted to watch. Suddenly, I became very aware that this was an actual porn shoot and we were all extras.

Oh! Right! We’re at a porn company!

People were not really interested in the food, they were interested in the torture part. Peter [Ackworth] our handsome host told us all that since her hands were free we should feel free to fill them with a cock or a vagina.

Blah blah blah blah blah. This is all the sex part that I don’t really care about right now.

I noticed that these events fall into the category of mob mentality after awhile. Most people on their own would probably not be able to just jump right in, but when you have a table full of people all doing it suddenly you feel brave.

[…]

The guests were getting more and more into the physical torture. […] We took a short break[…].

What I want to highlight is:

First of all we were all pretty fucking drunk, which always makes things a bit more comfortable.

[…]

It all escalated so quickly.

[…]

I realized that my entire participation in this event was when I smacked Chloe a couple of times with a riding crop. Mind you I did this with the husband of the pianist[…]

Blah blah, more sex.

At this point I realized just how drunk I was, just how late it was and that I needed to scoot. I missed out on the money shot as they say in the industry. I slipped out of the room quickly and quietly without disrupting the scene. I put my coat on descended the stairs and headed out into the San Francisco night.

Now, this is a particularly telling example because the alcohol here highlights an incredible disconnect between the so-called high class and all the rest of us. It also highlights how the distinction between the corporatism part of this economy goes against and has a tension with the community aspects of it.

I heard some of you earlier going, “Really, booze comfortable on porn sets?” Yeah, that’s ’cause that’s not allowed in the community spaces. Right? Alcohol is not supposed to be part of BDSM play, and again, as someone who does play with alcohol, that’s not a problem. The problem here is not walking your talk. Kink, Inc. likes to think of itself as great for the community and the community likes to welcome them as wonderfully representative. Are they?

Alcohol in the community is not just sort of against the community norms. It’s very against the community norms. Not to bring up old shit unnecessarily, here’s an entry from someone who discussed someone who entered the SF Citadel not just sort of drunk but shit-faced drunk, staggering drunk. And he was let in, and I guess I won’t name names but he’s the founder of a very important BDSM website that starts with the name of “Fet” and ends with “Life.”

[Audience laughter.]

And, again, the individual incident isn’t important here, but this kind of shit happens all the time. He was let in because he has Stande, he has social status, because he has access to social resources. Now, of course, this particular incident, everyone apologized, it blows over, but that shit happens all the time. There is no due process at all in these communities—not for any, like, malicious, necessarily, reason; it hasn’t been developed yet, it’s new—I get it. Maybe we should be thinking about that more.

I mean, how often does this happen elsewhere?

[Audience: "All the time."]

There ya go.

So, this is simple to solve on a philosophical level: either the community recognize Kink, Inc. as not part of it, or Kink, Inc. changes its ways to match community norms. Or, secret option C, everyone keeps believing in this polite fiction. ‘Cause that’s just easier. ‘Cause then you have the invisibility cloak.

These rules about alcohol, for example (there are others), police Scene class more than they police safety, more than they have a way to keep people safe. All rules about sex police class as well as sex. And the community, for their part, are not just okay with this, but practically fucking sycophantic to these people because they have access to social resources. It’s very much like the way an aspirational voter votes for Republicans, right, like in the midwest. They’re coming for your fuckin’ Social Security money and you’re still voting for Republicans. “Because one day,” they think, “one day, I’ll be rich. One day, I’ll have access to social resources. If I’m just fucking brown-nose-y enough, they’ll like me. And then I’ll get to go and play.” I thought like that for a while. I know other people do, too.

And just like [for the] aspirational voter, it’s never gonna happen. It’s just not. Because it doesn’t serve them. There are actual, real examples of this.

How am I doing on time?

[Johannes: Maybe another 5 or 10 minutes?]

Okay, then I won’t go into too many specific examples of this but you’re welcome to look me up and I’ll be happy to name names then, too.

My favorite comment, also about that Kink, Inc. virginity thing, August Knight was at first very concerned—August Knight who owns the SF Citadel—was very concerned about what was happening, in response to a post that was posted on FetLife. Then Peter Ackworth responds, very placatingly, “No, no, everything’s fine.” [August's] next take ends with:

Yay for a fantasy lived ! ahh if only I was young and cute and in my 20′s! [sic.]

Literally sycophantic. So, my sense on all this, is that the community’s response to things like this mirrors the way an abused person defends their abusers.

Now, this safety fetishization, this idea that there’s no alcohol in the dungeon, ever, no alcohol when you’re playing, all kinds of safety rules—this started…. Now, at the same time that this doesn’t actually work, the same time that it’s policing class, it also polices how people can get this kind of labour-capital, how people get access to play in the first place. Because the thing that you are most oftenly told when you’re not a part of the community, or you have an interest in BDSM but you don’t have an outlet to the community, is to go to the community to learn the skills to be—why?—safe. So you don’t hurt anybody, which is an important point, but the paths all wind back to “come to the community.” Go to a munch first, go to the educational workshops. What if you don’t have the money for educational workshops? What then?

So, mostly, in private groupings, that are not The Scene, people learn through peer exchanges, because there’s no formal structure. Now that there is a formal structure, now that there is a formal Scene—and Weiss also talks about this, of what she calls “the rise of the new scene”—most people were learning these scene skills from their own little peer groups. Now, with the Scene-State, it encourages classes, and skill itself has become salable, because you get to teach how to play with something.

And there’s a reason why education sucks in The Scene, especially for bottoms. Look at all those previous prejudices. And the people who don’t have to go that way—when I was at the Kink, Inc. Armory, everyone who I asked said they found The Scene through the company first, not the community. “How did you get involved in the BDSM community? How did you get involved in BDSM?” I asked. “Well, I joined the company,” [they said.]—so those are the people who are not part of this economic ladder.

But again, it’s not that people are out for you individually. No one cares about you. No one cares about me. People aren’t out to get you, or me. It’s that nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. And that reminds me, not only of the George Carlin quote that I just quoted, but also of this quote by Martin Luther King. He says:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.

It’s the middle class, right? That’s the systemic oppressors, they have numbers. Now why was the Scene-State thing created? Because of a population boom called the Internet. The Internet thrust mass amounts of new people to this kind of sexuality, this kind of understanding of what they want to do, giving them an outlet to express it, and as such created that exact kind of organizationally-induced resource scarcity.

And this is also very important for notions of the digital divide where increasingly expressions of sexuality are coming to the fore on the Internet, which not everyone has access to. Now, if you look this specifically from within the Scene-State context, you can think of the notion of, “Oh, you shouldn’t do BDSM, or you can’t do BDSM in a safe way unless you’re at a club, with DMs [dungeon monitors]“—basically lifeguards, it’s a little bit like hearing, “Print is dead,” which is the same as saying “Poor people don’t deserve to read.”

So, as Duncan, Laura Duncan was just talking about, is it about a right, or is it market participation? What is it that gets you this? What’s what gets you in here? And refusal to participate in the public BDSM Scene is tantamount to the heresy of rejecting a consumerism in which play is this kind of labour-capital. What do you do if you don’t want to be part of a capitalist world? You live like a hippie in the mountains, I guess. And the problem with that is, SM is fundamentally social behavior. So you can’t be on your own. It does not work.

So, okay, I’ll close out, I promise.

Things we need. That’s all really negative, really angry. We really do need equal representation. And not just in imagery, but also in presentations, and workshops, and organizational structure. We’re not going to get to a better place just by abandoning this. I might not want to save it if it were burning all down, but I do think it is actually—the Scene-State—is actually a very important thing and we do actually need to maintain and protect it legally and politically and for all sorts of reasons. It is the source of antiserums that will help make a sexually healthy society, if we can utilize it for that and not just worry about getting ourselves off all the time.

We need to fucking acknowledge that there’s a whole lost population out there, people who come to The Scene and then leave. Why? Not because it wasn’t the right place to for them, but because it has absolutely none of a structure that will actually work for them. There is no social safety net in The Scene.

What are, for example, the volume sales of BDSM-related sex toys, whips for example, which are presumably used with partners versus the number of people who attend play parties in those same zip [postal] codes? Where are they? You think they’re not playing? You think they come to the SF Citadel once, leave and then are just not kinky again?

And so, again, it is important to say. And all I want to leave you with is this idea that I got from Dr. Seuss. And he says, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, it’s not going to get better. It’s not.” That’s my presentation.

[Applause.]

[Johannes: Questions?]

[…]

So the question was—for the recording, I should repeat it—the question was whether or not a woman who was drunk would be allowed into community spaces. I don’t want to speak for community spaces, for what they would do. I don’t know what they would do, I don’t know the future, but I can tell you that one’s gender in The Scene is much less important than these other factors. It’s the intersection between gender and role orientation that makes a particular difference when you look at things from a social justice perspective. In The Scene, because it is a space that particularly problematizes these ideas of, “Well, only men are dominant, and only women are submissive,”—we have transgender individuals as well in The Scene, we have people who are women who top and men who bottom—so the salient characteristic of an individual is not their gender but their role orientation. Right?

The role orientation becomes the status. So in The Scene, whether you’re a top or a bottom is sort of almost more important. It’s kind of like The Scene’s version of whether you are a man or a woman, whether you privileged based on that characteristic.

And the other part that I’d want to highlight is that it depends on all the social resources that one has. It’s not just social capital, although that is, I think, the most important one in The Scene-State, specifically because it doesn’t have a formal economy as such—like, a currency economy. Reputation is currency in The Scene. You get a bad reputation, you’re not going to have access to play, right? So it’s much more important to say good things about other people. It’s almost actually a social requirement when you’re in The Scene—people in The Scene talk about other people’s play like they’re grooming one another, because that’s what it is. So it depends on the various kinds of—y’know—it’s the matrix of Weber’s three-component theory. That’s the way I see it.

[Audience member: "A question and a comment in two parts. First, where does switches fit into this whole mess that you're talking about. Because there are a great many people who are very invested in those stereotypes. At the same time, there are a great many people who switch to one degree or another. And how does that interact within the constructions of power that you're talking about?"]

That’s a really, really good question. I like to, often, relate it to the notion of bisexuality. It is less the case now, thank god—this is one of the things I’m very optimistic about with The Scene’s younger generations because they are putting a lot more fluidity into everything. So the question was where do switches fit into all of this. And the answer is that they often get read as either top or bottom depending on what they are currently doing in much the same way that if you’re bi, if you identify as a bisexual and you’re with a guy and you are a guy, you will be read as gay. And if you are with someone who’s seen as the opposite sex you will be read as straight, even though we all, or many of us in this room, are very frustrated with the whole fucking gender binary to begin with.

You can get, for example, you can pass as a top if you’re a switch. So you get a kind of Scene version of passing privilege. And if you wanna take that, great, use it and do something good with your privilege. That is what I would imagine—it is an ethical obligation to do so if you have privilege, to do something good. Don’t just be good, be good for something.

[Audience: "Would you consider—have you considered starting a new Scene or a new website for people who are not focused on social capital, that are more intelligent and socially aware…?"]

That sounds like a very, very energy-intensive project.

[Audience laughter. Audience member: "Have you considered it?"]

So, the question is have you ever considered starting a new Scene, etcetera. Um, have I considered it? Yes, a lot. Have I actually acted on it? No. I sort of tried, but, I’m angry. And people don’t necessarily—I would probably be the nihilist, and that is not good for the creation of new things.

[Johannes: "It could be worse! You could be the angry prophet!"]

[Audience laughter.]

I could do that. But it’s important, I think, for people to first—there is nothing wrong with also being part of The Scene. Right? This is a good place for a lot of people. The question that I’m asking is who is it good for, who does it serve more than others, and do people care? If the answer is no, they don’t care, then fine, don’t care. I’m trying to find people who do. And so, not having had much of another way to do so, I simply got very loud about this particular thing. And it has attracted, like I said, a kind of social capital where I got known for this.

I get play offers for being angry about this. Male Submission Art was one of the best things I could have done to get people who are the other side of the coin to me to be interested in me and the thing that I’m frustrated about is that the people who tend to then have that, stop. Because their needs are met. Well, good for fucking you. But where’s the rest? So that’s where I see [them fall short of] that ethical obligation I mentioned.

But I’d be interested in talking with you more about that, if you want to.

[Applause.]

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

—Thomas Paine

Kink, in exile:

There has been an explosion around the topic of male submission. Holding space for it, celebrating it, legitimizing it and so on. This has been amazing to witness[…].

[…]

I’m awake at 4 in the morning furious and saddened by every account of pain, belittlement, and exclusion I’ve read. Outraged that it took me this long to figure out that my difficulty in finding submissive men in the BDSM scene was not an isolated incident and even more outraged by what these men have gone through.

So this is the moment when I cry through my anger, because when morning comes for real I’ll put on my big girl panties and go out to change the world. But right now I’ll just send a shout-out to all the men who have been strong enough, amazing enough, and brave enough to plow through the bullshit and let me see them on their knees while I cry through my optimism.

Galiana Chance:

It started with @maymaym (the guy behind the visual-celebration-of-male-submission site MaleSubmissionArt.com) posting a link to this incredibly well-written piece discussing how often members of the BDSM scene devalue male submissives, even while valuing female dominants.

[…]

Every voice that speaks out in celebration of male submissives helps the conversation. Tonight, the urge to join the conversation overwhelmed me. I had to join.

Professor Chaos:

[I]t’s about fucking time. Because the kink scene treats male subs as if they are unwanted, uninvited guests, not recognizing the fact that they are real people with feelings of their own, that their dominant partners cherish them. Every time I see a Fetlife profile that reads “I’m not attracted to submissive men” (frequently, in my experience, on the profiles of female switches and occasionally other female dominants), my stomach clenches. They don’t seem to realize that such an attitude is linked to another problem in the scene: the tokenization of female dominants.

Perhaps the deepest pain many female-identified people have shared with me, whether kinky or otherwise, dominant or submissive, whether young or old, fat or thin, disabled or abled, queer or heteronormative, married or single, monogamous or polyamorous, is the resentment of believing that no matter the sex they have, a male partner feels satisfied while they do not.

“It makes me jealous,” one woman told me over beers.

I nodded. “It should,” I agreed with her. But it has been difficult for me to trust that the depth with which I can empathize is actually understood. For as long as female sexuality is perceived as performative, male sexuality—regardless of its diversity—is perceived as entitled. But, trapped in gendered frames, neither female nor male sexuality is monolithic; the submissive masculine is therefore revelatory.

As Tomio Black said,

The main task before me is to depathologize #MaleSubmission so that it is seen as a normal and healthy way for people to authentically love.

Or, in Chaos’s words:

While male subs are not seen as potential objects of desire, female doms are seen only as objects of desire. That’s how I feel sometimes as a femme dom in the public scene: they see me, but not my desires.

[…]

And so I feel tokenized. It’s not fair to me, because where would I, a femme dom, be without my masculine sub? We are two sides of a coin. Today I am not beating my queer drum; today I am borrowing maymay’s drum: You cannot truly respect me without respecting my submissive as well. If you value me, you must value him.

“I finally figured out what upsets me about your blog,” one man said, turning to me after a time.

I smiled and turned to face him. “Really? Please tell me!”

“Now that I’ve read your writing, it’s harder for me to just enjoy the BDSM play I do and the sex I have without thinking about how it affects people like you and the culture we live in.”

“That’s wonderful!” I said, my smile widening. He frowned, but it was a friendly frown, his eyebrows furrowed pensively rather than aggrieved.

Submissive men are not monolithic, either. In a comment on Chaos’s post, I plaintively said:

It is a sad fact that most submissive men I have encountered are misogynistic shitwads. They are not exactly helping you or I find cultural acceptance, Tomio, and yet I have an enormous compassion for them because I can so clearly see the pain, desperation, and ignorance at the root of their aggressively obsequious behavior.

One day last year, I was invited to a semi-private dinner party following a sexuality conference. There, an older man, well-known in the sexuality communities for the sex toy company he owns, approached me, drink in hand. He was poorly shaven, his mismatched clothing adding to his unkempt appearance. Something in his eyes betrayed the existence of a continual internal monologue that may have never been shared with another person.

“After I saw your KinkForAll Providence video,” he started, “I’ve been reading your blog. And I just wanted to say I really like it. You put words to stuff I couldn’t say on my own.”

The party was bustling, but small. We moved to a corner of the dinner table and continued talking. He told me of finding Playboy Magazines as a teenager, of growing up into a man with a 9-5 job and an unhappy social life. “I’d get up, go to work, come home at five or six, and look through the [local paper] for the sex ads.”

“Did you ever go?”

“A bunch of times.”

This is an aspect that deserves more words. For now, Galiana offers some that I have angrily (and, to some, offensively) stated years earlier:

I’m starting to understand my potential value in this conversation: to answer the question of “where do male submissives go if they don’t feel comfortable at ‘BDSM scene’ events?” I believe that large numbers of them go to anonymous online female dominants for pay, at least now and then. (I’m a phone sex operator, so this isn’t simply a theoretical idea I’m espousing – I make part of my living talking to them, bless their broken hearts)

And there, online, the extremes of the fantasy are even more heavily emphasized, because it’s simpler to market an extreme, and most people do not have the ability to market nuance. In fact, I’m not sure it’s possible to market nuance at all.

So a male submissive who feels rejected by an in-person group for free may try his hand online for pay, and be met with a WALL of “Dominas” calling him a loser, a wanker, a pathetic bitch, etc, and then… well, then, he either accepts those labels and sees himself as “less than”, or …

Or he remains unspeakably strong in the face of all this stupidity and keeps holding his head high until he finds a partner who is worth him lowering his eyes to. May it be so, over and over.

I don’t believe I could ever feel comfortable paying for sex or BDSM play of any kind—and so to date I never have. But, now, I do better understand its undeniably legitimate value.

Sitting across from the older man that day at the conference’s after party, I asked him, “Do you still see sex workers and pro-dommes?”

“No, I work all the time now,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“It makes me happy to know that the toys I make give other people great orgasms. I just wish someone would want to use one of my toys on me, sometimes.”

“Your girlfriend doesn’t?”

He raised his glass and waved the drink around, looking around with a frown on his face. I didn’t pry. Instead, I said, “I know. It’s hard for me, too.”

He looked at me, disbelieving. It’s become inevitable; I’ve had this conversation with enough people to know where it was going. “Come on,” he said, “you must play all the time.”

I shook my head. His arm hit the table with a thump. He slouched further in his chair. “Oh, man. If you can’t get play, I’ll never….”

There was a long silence. He looked around at the apartment we were in. All of the guests had left the living room and were busy chatting with one another in the kitchen, having drifted further and further away from us—a perfect metaphor for our current topic of conversation.

“How do you do it?” he asked at last.

“Do what?”

“Keep writing.”

I smiled. “What would you do after you’ve given up on having a sexually satisfied life?” I asked him.

“God, I don’t know,” he said.

“Why do you keep making sex toys?” I asked. He looked puzzled, so I explained: “You’re the giant on whose shoulders I’m standing. Thank you so much.” Slowly, he nodded. We drank more.

If you’re reading this, and you own certain sex toys, it’s quite possible you have this man to thank for that. I do. But you’ll never need to thank him. You’ll never have to be grateful. All you have to do is take it for granted—and understand why that is a good thing. As Galiana Chance put it:

Ideas spread. They may spread slowly, but imagine how much greater the chances are now of forming a healthy femdom/malesub relationship than even just 20 years ago. I remember 1991 – I was 21 – and how little information I had available to me. My mind boggles.

More recently, I was in Seattle, unexpectedly performing at a Polyamory Fashion Show at The Center for Sex Positive Culture. There, a woman approached me while I was talking to a friend who lives in that town. “It looks like the lady would like to talk to you,” I said to my friend, about to excuse myself.

But before I could, the woman turned to me, saying, “I just wanted to thank you for MaleSubmissionArt.com.”

Surprised, I turned to my friend, then back to the woman. “Oh, um, thanks.” I introduced myself to her more formally. My friend politely excused herself, nodding at me as she gave us space to talk.

“I’m a switch, but I wanted you to know that your websites have really helped me enjoy topping men lately. Can I give you a hug?” the woman asked.

“Uhm, sure,” I said, smiling as I realized the full meaning of her words: sometime in the last two years or so, somewhere in the world, this woman and a man she played with had a good time thanks, at least in some small part, to my publications. We embraced. “Hugs are great!”

Long ago, Susan B. Anthony said, “It is not our job to make young women grateful. It is to make them ungrateful, so they keep going.”

In affirming Chaos’s sentiments, Kink In Exile wrote:

[W]hat does it mean for me in this world that the person I want to play with most, that beautiful strong geeky smart sexually submissive man, comes wounded because the world got to him before I had a chance? I have been known to speak to the fact that men are hurt by the rape of women because their sex life can not help [but] be effect[ed] by a one in four chance that their female partner is a survivor of sexual violence. Is this the BDSM parallel? There are no submissive men and also there is never a line for the ladies room in the engineering building? Are submissive men and women in short skirts equally public property?

If we need a respite, let’s celebrate the small victory of this burgeoning conversation. And, then, keep going.

I want something
that's better than this.
And I'm not sure exactly what it is
but I think that we could build it
if we try together.

[…]

And that very same night,
kids all across the earth
felt lonely and confused,
frightened and unsure,
and we're trying to find one another
through a system that keeps us apart.

—Evan Greer

It’s been clear for some time that FetLife has passed a tipping point. It’s the new behemoth everyone in their sphere of influence has to accommodate “because of their immense user base and perceived power,” to borrow Jeff Atwood’s words from a time not-yet-forgotten. But FetLife’s insulation away from the rest of the Internet is a serious problem.

Despite my making some noise about this problem, little actually improved. When I spoke about FetLife at the Atlanta Poly Weekend conference back in March, I discussed how prioritizing interoperability is a sort of social anti-censorship measure:

Since anything that declares itself sexuality-related becomes a target for censorship, building sexuality-specific infrastructure is a recipe for disaster.

[…]

I’m suggesting that for both users of a network, like you and me, as well as creators of networks and networking tools, like […] FetLife’s founder, John Baku, interoperability should be prioritized.

For example, I think the single best thing about FetLife is its “Events near me” page, but the single worst thing about it is that none of these events are findable from outside FetLife. […] FetLife is currently incompatible with any other network. […] This is also culturally dangerous because it nurtures an in-group/out-group mentality among FetLife users. But the “you’re either with us or against us” mindset offers no space either for allies or dissension, so the longer FetLife remains a technological monoculture, the more it becomes a social ghetto.

Unfortunately, to date FetLife seems at best disinclined and at worst actively hostile to the prospect of interoperating with the rest of the Internet. So, in an attempt to address this issue myself, I began writing a couple software tools with the aim of demonstrating the usefulness of integrating FetLife with other services. Both tools are showcased at the end of this post.

FetLife’s Terms of Use explicitly prohibit the “use [of] automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, or the like to download data from any BitLove Inc Network database.” I hope the spirit of these terms do not match their liability-limiting letter, because if improving things means breaking The Rules, then I’ll fucking break them.

Like Facebook before it, and AOL before Facebook, FetLife seems almost eager to repeat others’ mistakes. Here, too, Jeff Atwood provides useful historical context:

It was so clear to me back in 1999 that AOL was doomed. But at the time, any criticism of AOL was heresy. […] Ten years later, is AOL is even relevant? Does anyone care?

The lesson I take from this is that no matter how wonderful your walled garden is, it can’t compete with the public, open internet.

It’s clear to me that FetLife, like its walled garden predecessors, is doomed unless it rethinks its approach. Technological interoperability is a bit like sex; yeah, having sex will potentially expose you to more unknowns than if you never have any, and that’s risky, but if you adhere to safety best-practices, you’re likely to find it very rewarding. Abandoning the walled garden mentality isn’t just good for the services you interface with, it’s also good for you.

Case in point, I didn’t notice FetLife had a persistent backdoor account access security problem until I started poking at its technical implementation. I wasn’t even looking for flaws, but rather learning enough about its inner workings so I could build tools that interoperated with the service. Trying to make FetLife better in one way quickly revealed other, unrelated avenues for improvement. Another way to improve FetLife is to encourage people to tinker and poke and test it—whether FetLife likes it or not, whether it adheres to The Rules or not.

Make no mistake: for FetLife to actually remain a viable for-profit service, then we—its users—are going to find ourselves increasingly commoditized. Locked in their capitalistic, every-man-for-themselves ideology, these competitive businesses treat their users as another commodity to control rather than the seeds generating their capital in the first place. But don’t take my word for it, take John Baku’s own Twitter bio:

Picking a fight with the Sex 1.0 players. I might be David but you are a dumbass Goliath.

Well, I ask you to consider: if FetLife is David and the “Sex 1.0” players are Goliath, and if this is indeed a fight, then we’re a bunch of raw materials! But we’re raw materials that don’t mean to become weapons in others’ fight. Weapons never end fights, they only escalate them. We can’t win by being weapons, but we can win by changing the game.

Ironically, most social networking businesses, including FetLife, are incredibly anti-social, yet this mindset is fundamentally antithetical to the principles on which the Internet and the Web were designed:

[T]he Web is a technology that puts control into the hands of its users.

This is why we don’t need to wait for FetLife’s blessing to write tools that interoperate with it. We’re already interoperating with it through software. And, y’know what? Software isn’t so different from you and me.

But perhaps more importantly, I’m not even asking for FetLife’s blessing because I want you, dear reader, to understand that no one ever needs permission to make things better. In other words: fuck The Powers That Be, and their Terms.

New FetLife Tools

The two quick ‘n’ dirty demo tools I wrote are the Better FetLife Userscript and the FetLife Bridge StatusNet plugin. The former is a downloadable script you install in your browser to easily move (export) user profile and event data from FetLife.com pages into your address book and calendaring application of choice, such as iCal or Google Calendar. The latter is a cross-posting tool that allows StatusNet users to post a FetLife status update whenever they publish a “tweet.”

Both tools work well, but are still crude, lacking in professional polish. I’m publishing them in this state anyway because I haven’t the energy to perfect them on my own, but maybe you can help. Also, kaizen, CANI, and all that jazz.

Better FetLife Userscript

With FetLife now nearing a million users, they’ve “made it.” If you want to know what’s happening in any sex-positive social sphere, it is now almost necessary to monitor FetLife rather than ignore it. More and more often I’m seeing events ranging from casual meetups to local organizations’ meetings to professionally-promoted parties getting listed on FetLife but nowhere else. Perusing FetLife’s events section is fast becoming a requirement to stay in-the-know about your local Scene goings-on.

Some savvy organizers keep public calendars for their own groups, but many of these are poorly maintained, out of date or inaccurate; FetLife’s where it’s at. Enter the Better FetLife Userscript: a (currently only Firefox) browser plugin that copies event information from FetLife into a Google Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, Apple iCal event and more. Here’s a short video showing you how to install and use the tool:

Since creating this video demo, I also added the ability to export a FetLife user profile as an address book contact (in vCard format). Now you can quickly download events and people to your personal computer without having to copy-and-paste anything from FetLife. In the future, I’d also like to see features to accomplish the following tasks:

• Export all events on a single listing page in addition to the individual event pages.
• One-click cross-posting of FetLife Journal entries to a MetaWeblog API-enabled blog (like WordPress, Blogger, etc.), pre-populated with proper link-back, citations, and source attribution.
• One-click cross-posting of FetLife pictures to Flickr, Picasa Web, or another popular image sharing service.
• Linkify the URLs in comments on FetLife status updates.
• Anything and everything else you can dream up to make FetLife better from the client side. (Just leave a comment on the project page or the project’s UserScripts.org page to let me know what you come up with.)

Some of these things are already possible in specific, limited ways. For instance, you can use the “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet to select and cross-post any text or images on a FetLife.com page to your Tumblr blog. You can do something similar with the PressThis! bookmarklet for WordPress. Those are decent solutions for more specific workflows, but I’d still like something more generally useful.

FetLife Bridge StatusNet Plugin

If you’ve “friended” me on FetLife (and if you haven’t, please feel free to), you may have noticed I’ve appeared a lot more active there by posting many status updates. In fact, these updates are coming from my own website running an open source Twitter clone called StatusNet. My site automatically cross-posts to FetLife every time I send a “tweet.” It’s my way of practicing what I preach:

[W]ith regard to your own personal distribution network’s structure, I’m suggesting that you use FetLife and Facebook and your own WordPress blog, or whatever other services and platforms you have the resources to utilize. In other words, don’t put all your eggs in one basket since this kind of diversification offers redundancy on the distribution network level itself.

I wrote the FetLife Bridge StatusNet Plugin to acquire “the resources to utilize” a distribution network that I was ignoring. That’s why, if you follow me in numerous social networking venues, you’re likely to see similar content on all of them: the Internet makes it inexpensive for me to “literally” be in multiple places at once, letting you control where and when you want to see me. In the future, I’d like to see a similar tool that bridges Twitter to FetLife so those of you using both of those services can duplicate your Twitter posts as FetLife status updates without needing to host your own StatusNet installation.

In particular, I’d like to improve this plugin so that it uses StatusNet’s Foreign service class instead of my own janky getup, but I haven’t gotten around to learning how to do that yet. (And it’s not like anyone’s subsidizing me for doing any of this.) For now, it should work smoothly on any StatusNet installation with PHP 5.2 and up.

To use the FetLife Bridge:

1. Download and install it as you would any of the other StatusNet plugins, that is, by copying the plugin folder into the local/ folder.
2. Activate the plugin by adding the following to the bottom of your StatusNet config.php file:

   addPlugin('FetLifeBridge');

3. Navigate to the FetLife Settings tab in the Account menu and enter your FetLife username and password, as shown in the screenshot below:
   

Security-conscious users (especially those installing this on a shared host) should note that the plugin currently stores your FetLife password in an unencrypted text file, so once you configure the plugin you may want to manually restrict the permissions on the automatically-generated local/FetLifeBridge/fetlifesettings.ini file (another big reason I want to use the Foreign service class soon).

What Happens Next?

The software above serves simply to scratch my own itch and to give you a taste of what is possible. These are just two of an infinite number of ideas. How about a tool that periodically polls your FetLife account for your latest activity and moves data in the other direction? (A kind of poor man’s ActivityStream?) Maybe a tool that extracts all the listed relationship data from a given profile and creates a visualization using GraphViz? (It’ll take your game of six degrees of separation to a whole new level!)

The possibilities are endless. So long as you behave responsibly, don’t let anyone say you can’t scale these walls. After all, we’re from the Internet. Just let ‘em try to fucking stop us. ;)

In the end, I want something that’s better than this. And I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I think that we could build it if we try together…but I’ve got a feeling that we’re winning as I hear more and more and more of us say: I want something that’s better than this.

Update: Check it out! Other people are beginning to write interoperability-focused tools. In light of that, I’ll be adding links to other tools as I am made aware of them to the following list.

• FetLife2GCal — Adds 1-click export of events listed on FetLife to Google Calendar to Firefox. Published by Stefan Knotts.
• Wrote a tool? Leave a comment, send me an @-mention on Twitter, or otherwise let me know and I’ll add it to this list.