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.

(Watch a .mov video of the unmitigated issue as it existed in June 2011. Read a text transcript of the voiceover.)

In order to avoid further risking the privacy of FetLife users—including myself!—I sent FetLife an email on June 14 at 10:57 PM informing them of what I saw and asking them what they planned to do to resolve or at least mitigate the severity of the issue. My email conversation with FetLife is published at the very end of this post. The short version: after my repeated insistence, they took some steps to mitigate (but not exactly resolve) the issue.

I’ll make post-publication updates and clearly mark edits to this post when or if FetLife (or, more accurately, BitLove, Inc., formerly Protose Inc.) addresses the issues discussed here further.

Update, August 17, 2011, 3:53 AM local time: Within a week of this post being published, FetLife announced its SSL support was in the works. They then began rolling out site-wide SSL, beginning with paid subscribers (“supporters”) yesterday, and also turned on the feature for my own account early. Earlier tonight, I noticed the remainder of my various (non-paid) test accounts also got switched to SSL. (Yay!) I haven’t had a chance to look at the site again in any technical depth, but I’m very pleased to see this change.

Update, December 20, 2011, 5:08 AM local time: In a comment, Ian reports that the switch FetLife made to a CDN as part of their migration to site-wide SSL caused a new problem: all of your FetLife profile images are publicly viewable, no login required. This is confirmed.

This post is split into sections. I wrote a plain-English summary describing the issues, their severity, and mitigation in language I tried to keep so simple everyone can understand. The Technical Details section provides another analysis with a step-by-step demonstration, along with references to background information for the technically interested but uneducated reader. Finally, an Editorial section is where I’ll get on my well-worn soapbox about this whole thing.

Plain-English Summary

Due to the way FetLife handled your login status, an attacker monitoring your computer could secretly gain permanent, full, and irrevocable access to your FetLife account simply by observing your browser fetch any page on FetLife.com while you were logged in.

If this happened to you, it meant an attacker could do anything on FetLife that you could, as though they were you. For example, an attacker could be able to:

• log in as you, whenever they want to
• read your private conversations, and view all your photos, including the ones you have set to “friends only”
• view all private photos your friends shared with you
• post status updates, comment in group discussions, write entries, and upload images as if they were you
• edit your profile and fetish list
• send anyone on FetLife a friend request as you, or remove friends from your friend list
• change all of your account settings, including your FetLife password and email address

There’s only one thing the attacker couldn’t do: find out what your original password was. To the best of my knowledge, this issue affected FetLife.com from its inception several years ago until last month.

After my prodding in June, FetLife changed the way it handles your login status so that an attacker couldn’t retain secret access to your account for more than one month. They also made changes that help prevent an attacker from locking you out of your own account.

How was this possible?

When you log in to FetLife, your browser is sent a “session cookie” that acts like a special key intended only for you. As you use the site, your web browser presents this special key to FetLife every time you load a page. Using session cookies is not bad per se; it’s standard practice, and ensures you don’t have to type your password each time you click another link.

However, since FetLife doesn’t send you this cookie privately, it’s very easy for someone else to get a copy of it. If they do, they get to use it just like you did, and there would be no way for you to find out if someone has done that. Worse, since FetLife didn’t put even basic limitations on the cookie, other people could use their copy of it forever, from any computer, even after you logged out or changed your FetLife password, and there was nothing you could do to stop them.

Thanks to the changes FetLife made last month, changing your password will allow you to regain control of your account from an attacker who may be using your special key (session cookie). Naturally, I’d suggest you change your FetLife password from your home Internet connection as soon as you can. (Do not change your FetLife password at a Wi-Fi café, though! See below.)

But FetLife says they’re secure!

FetLife says they “use SSL to login to FetLife,” which is “the same technology your bank uses when you login to their website.” It’s true that this does mean your user name and password can’t be (easily) stolen while you are logging in. (Your user name and password can, however, be easily stolen when you change your password, since FetLife doesn’t use SSL for that—an equally glaring oversight making the point rather moot anyway.) But since the session cookie (your special key) is not returned to you using SSL, an attacker never needs to see you log in and never has to know your password to gain virtually total control of your account.

Moreover, there are numerous other ways an attacker could get a copy of your session cookie and your special key, ways that not even using SSL can protect you against. One way would be by tricking you into visiting a different, malicious website that could then watch as it makes your computer visit FetLife.com behind your back. And if anyone else has access to the computer (e.g., a family, library, or frenemy’s machine) they can easily save a copy of your session cookie and use it later.

FetLife also says that “at any time, you can delete the cookies that are on you [sic] computer.” This is true, but irrelevant; you can’t delete a copy of a cookie on someone else’s computer.

Mitigation: How can FetLife fix this and what can I do to protect myself?

There are a number things FetLife can do to address the issue, either by more strongly securing the communications between you and FetLife.com or by limiting the usefulness of the special key they give you (i.e., the session cookie). While no single item is a panacea, each significantly reduces the threat. (This is known as “defense in depth.”) So, while FetLife deserves some (faint) praise for finally taking some steps to protect its users, FetLife would take all reasonable steps as soon as possible to maximally protect you if it is, indeed, a priority for them.

First, FetLife could use SSL for everything (not just logging in), so that even if an attacker does see you load some page, they can’t get your key. This is also called “SSL-only browsing” and has long been recommended to be enabled by default for everyone. While they are late in doing so, to their credit, FetLife told me they are working on making this happen in “60-90 days.” If implemented correctly, this will protect you against the simplest (and thus most common) attacks, but not all of them.

Second, FetLife could do a number of things to limit what an attacker could do even if they did get your special key, even without fundamentally changing the way their current system works. In simple terms, industry developers accept several measures as standard security practice:

• Expiring the special key on its own after a reasonable amount of time, after which it’s no longer good, and you’re given a new one instead.
• Asking you for your password every time you try to do some particularly sensitive action, like changing your account’s email address or changing your password to something new.
• Associating the key with the specific computer you’re using so that if it’s used somewhere else, the system will ignore it and ask you for your password again.

Among its recent changes, FetLife began adopting the first two measures. FetLife now limits the lifetime of any given session cookie to 30 days. FetLife will also now prompt you to enter your old password when changing it to something new. That’s a good start, but it leaves an obvious loophole. An attacker could still change your account’s email address to one they control, and then use FetLife’s “Forgot your login information?” feature to reset your password as they wish.

The takeaway is that there are many safer ways to handle your key than what FetLife was (and, arguably, still is) doing with it.

There’s sadly very little you can do to protect yourself, as a user. Since I sometimes still want to use FetLife but I don’t want to risk losing my special key, I registered a second FetLife account. I now use that account instead of my “real” one for reading group discussions, looking at people’s profiles, and doing anything that I don’t have to use my real account for. I only use my real account from my desktop, at home, to reduce the chances of accidentally exposing my secret key to an attacker; my laptop is always logged into FetLife using my dummy account.

What can I do to help?

You can help a lot simply by encouraging FetLife to take even small steps that protect your safety. Every additional security feature FetLife adds makes you that much safer by making it that much harder for an attacker to pretend to be you. Right now, FetLife’s only security focus is at “the gate,” the login page. Adding safety features inside FetLife as well as between it and the outside world is just as important as strengthening its walls (insofar as it is appropriate to have those walls, anyway…).

• Write to privacy@fetlife.com and complain. Seriously. All you have to do is air your concern. Just like any other company, FetLife will respond to pressure from its users, but only if its users actually pressure the company into acting. And, just like any other company, they will probably respond first with lip service in an attempt to placate you, but will eventually cave to user demands (if their past correspondence with me is any indication).
• Tell FetLife you won’t support them financially until they implement multiple, layered security precautions (“defense in depth”). Paying money for a service that’s insecure in the hopes that it will become more secure is as silly as paying for rotten food in the hopes that it will ripen. That’s just backwards.
• Acknowledge the fact that FetLife intendsto be a business first, and a community hub second (if at all). If you really want to be pro-active, raise funds and tell FetLife you’ll award them a bounty when they implement security and privacy improvements. I don’t have time to manage a campaign like this myself but, I promise you, nothing motivates for-profit companies more than more profit! Here are some ideas you can encourage FetLife to prioritize and implement with the funds you raise:
  • An “activity on this account” screen that shows us the locations from which our accounts were last accessed in order to help us detect suspicious activity. See also Last account activity by Google.
  • Implement OAuth so we can link our FetLife accounts to other identity providers and log in using, for instance, our Twitter accounts. (This would also go a long way towards improving FetLife’s interoperability more generally.)
  • Offer one-time passwords that get sent as a text message (SMS) to your mobile phone. See also Single-Use Codes in Hotmail.
• Educate yourself and your fellow FetLife users. Learn about the problems and how to avoid pitfalls, and then share your knowledge freely, generously, and liberally with others; republish or link them to this post, for example.

Ultimately, this is not very complicated, and you can let others make their own choices about how secure or insecure they’re willing to be. But, of all communities, this one should understand the importance of making informed choices.

Technical details

As FetLife says on its privacy page:

FetLife uses cookies for authentication and to store information in between page requests.

When a user requests a FetLife.com web page, FetLife looks for a cookie with the name _FetLife_session and reads its value. Over the wire, a logged-in user’s _FetLife_session cookie looked something like this:

BAh7CjoQX2NzcmZfdG9rZW4iMTRmMjdTcDNqUE9HTXNUdWo0UmlMSmxjOGg4ckxuZzhzTEY1V0QwUEVHS1E9Og9zZXNzaW9uX2lkIiVkOWMyZDYzOGI0ODU4MDI5MDlhNzRjMzRmZjQ1MmJkNzoUY3VycmVudF91c2VyX2lkaQOfow4iCmZsYXNoSUM6J0FjdGlvbkNvbnRyb2xsZXI6OkZsYXNoOjpGbGFzaEhhc2h7AAY6CkB1c2VkewA6FGFiaW5nb19pZGVudGl0eWwrCEq1JAICAA%3D%3D--a8128aa96ed5da1ec9d4fda35f1ad366d8ea21f2

Figure 1 shows Firebug requesting the FetLife home page using the above cookie (which, yes, was valid and belongs to a test FetLife account nicknamed “fetfails”).

A _FetLife_session cookie is a Base64- and URL-encoded blob containing several pieces of data, evidently produced by the FetLife Ruby on Rails application. Among the data in the cookie is the current user’s ID and associated session ID, in this case 959391 and d9c2d638b485802909a74c34ff452bd7, respectively.¹

Actually stealing a cookie isn’t something I’m going to describe in detail because it’s stupidly easy and I don’t want to encourage that kind of mischief. Suffice it to say that well-known tools like Firesheep make it trivial.² And while that’s the simplest way to steal cookies, other attack vectors exist as well, particularly against users who browse with Internet Explorer.³

In any case, getting a cookie is far too easy. The stolen session cookie was, in FetLife’s case, functionally equivalent to an automatic, and permanent login. FetLife basically said, “whoever shows me this cookie is logged in as user ID 959391, a.k.a. ‘fetfails’.”

Once an attacker got a logged-in user’s (victim’s) _FetLife_session cookie, they merely need to send that cookie in place of the one FetLife sent whenever they wanted to impersonate the victim. This is possible using a tool like the Edit This Cookie extension for Google Chrome. Figure 2 illustrates how simple an attack might have looked like against my “fetfails” test account:

1. Navigate to the FetLife home page (using Chrome with the aforementioned extension installed).
2. Click the “Edit This Cookie” icon at the top right the Chrome window.
3. Expand the section labeled _FetLife_session.
4. Copy and paste the (stolen) encoded cookie into the valuefield, replacing the old value. For the next month, you can copy and paste the following session cookie value to try this out yourself:

   BAh7DDoQbGFzdF9hY2Nlc3NsKwdma0BOOhRjdXJyZW50X3VzZXJfaWRpA5%2BjDjoPc2Vzc2lvbl9pZCIlNmQzNThiZjY1NDRhYzdlZTU2NzQ2NmE4YmI5NzI0NzM6EF9jc3JmX3Rva2VuIjFmVVU3aG15SUU1Slh5cDluQlYxU1F5VXEyZU0yekhBUE5JUXU1VCtiRjA4PToGcyItMWI3MDg1YjAxYzFlNDczMmU3YTAyMjZhOTUyNDc2OWFjMDc3NTk3YSIKZmxhc2hJQzonQWN0aW9uQ29udHJvbGxlcjo6Rmxhc2g6OkZsYXNoSGFzaHsABjoKQHVzZWR7ADoUYWJpbmdvX2lkZW50aXR5bCsHxK8i6w%3D%3D--de0b9e177e21d67d5e345e48dd04604cc4320ac8

5. Click “Submit Cookie Changes”.
   
6. Reload the FetLife home page.

Voila; that’s all an attacker needed to do to be logged into FetLife as the “fetfails” user. And since FetLife never asked for a password once you’re already logged in, the cookie granted the attacker full access to fetfails’s account. Furthermore, since FetLife didn’t ever expire the cookie, the attacker could continue to use it for as long as they wanted.

On a website that uses server-side sessions instead of cookie-based ones, when you click “logout,” the session cookie you used to log in with would never work again. On FetLife, however, even after the “fetfails” user clicks the “Logout” link, the above procedure continued to work—and it still does, for up to 30 days, if you manage to steal another user’s session cookie. There was nothing a user could have done to invalidate the cookie; lose control of one cookie, and you lost exclusive control of your FetLife account.

This susceptibility to replay attacks against a Rails application (like FetLife) when the default cookie-based sessions are used was discussed way back in 2007. It’s also addressed in §2.6 of the Ruby on Rails Security Guide.

While rolling out SSL site-wide would certainly help, so would a number of other things, like the ones I already described in the mitigation section of this post. Moreover, those things don’t require the kind of expensive hardware overhead that switching away from cookie-based sessions or even implementing SSL do and, further, they should be done anyway. It’s doing those other things that make “defense in depth” actually defense in depth.

Finally, the importance of all this was brutally demonstrated more than 6 months ago.

Editorial

As FetLife’s users, we deserve to know what it is that FetLife is or is not actually doing to protect our privacy, not just what FetLife is saying about what they are doing to protect our privacy. It is the distance between how safe you feel and how safe you actually are that is the threat. If you feel safe when you are not, you’re a much easier target for an attacker than if you are aware of your vulnerabilities.

If you already knew that you currently have little to no protection when using FetLife and you chose not to do anything differently in light of that—if you already knew the emperor is naked and you chose to pretend that he is clothed anyway—then, great! More power to your polite fiction! However, if you falsely believed you were secure because you were intentionally or accidentally misled, then I say shame on those who mislead you.

FetLife knew better, and then dragged their feet. They have and continue to mislead people. This is not news.

Back in March, I described how FetLife’s lack of granular privacy controls meant that anyone who wanted to could gain access to so-called “private” (i.e., not-for-public-consumption) material simply by creating a new account and logging in as any normal user might:

For an individual, FetLife’s primary “privacy” offering is simply that nothing you post will be indexed by search engines like Google. Since there is no way to access FetLife from outside FetLife, it’s like Vegas: what you say on FetLife stays on FetLife. The implicit claim, then, is that the entire container is safe.

However, since all that is required to gain access to FetLife membership is a (free) email address, the claim is farcical on its face. Claiming FetLife is either private or safe for any given individual is like breaking open someone’s back door and then selling them a stronger lock for their front door.

FetLife’s “front door” is its login page. By requiring you to use that login page to view any content at all, what FetLife is saying to laymen users is, “Nobody who tries can enter unless they go through this door.” The implicit claim in this case is that FetLife understands that because what you do inside FetLife is more sensitive than what you do on the public Internet, it needs special protections.

In this way, FetLife has made a claim about their behavior. But the distance between their claim and their actions is considerable, and it is foolhardy at best to obscure or deny the fact that this distance exists.

What’s so interesting to me about FetLife is that, unlike Facebook’s users, among whom only the clearly deluded have any trust in the company, the vast majority of FetLife’s user base seem ardently vocal in their adoration. Could this be due to the extraordinarily personal nature of the content FetLife hosts for them? I can’t imagine a typical user (which I am not) talking openly about their fetishes on Facebook, for example.

Both FetLife and Facebook arguably have monopolistic control over their users’ online social lives. But of the two, FetLife is in a far more trusted position because many people who use it do so precisely to avoid using services that aren’t friendly to sexual expression (like, say, Facebook). In other words, most of FetLife’s adoring fans don’t just treat the company like a friend, they treat it like the friend they send naked photos of themselves to, the friend they ask to pass on the sexually explicit note they wrote to their sweetheart(s). And not just any note, but the note about that totally taboo fantasy. Because, why not? That’s okay here! I mean, it’s FetLife, not Facebook!

And y’know what? That’s actually really cool! No, not just cool, that’s awesome. And not merely awesome, but culturally necessary. Just in case it isn’t clear, yes, I’m actually praising FetLife. But as the only large social network not actively hostile to (most) sexual expression, FetLife has also become the single, giant basket many of us have placed our eggs in. And that makes it even more important for FetLife to go the extra mile to secure us.

FetLife is continuing to develop new features, seemingly pumping them out like crazy. As I was putting this post together, they announced they were “starting to roll out the ability to upload pics via email from your phone to your FetLife profile” and then proudly announced “100% of People Have the Ability to Upload Pics via Email.” While that sounds cool, I guess, I have to wonder whether or not their users’ privacy and security are being taken as seriously as how whatever the next shiny feature is handled.

Moreover, if the FetLife team really is as small as they make it out to be, it’s even more unlikely that they’re developing new functionality while simultaneously spending the same amount of brainpower prioritizing security, no matter what they say. Immediately after I learned of the persistent nature of this issue, I asked the FetLife crew if they were planning on implementing SSL-only browsing:⁴

Does @FetLife plan to enforce SSL/TLS on all logged-in requests soon? If so, on what timeline? /cc @JohnBaku @JamesGolick #FetLife #security

One of their developers, James Golick, responded in the affirmative:

@maymaym We’re going to do it. It’s on our list, but it’s nontrivial for various reasons. We never make timeline promises though, sorry.

When I asked if security was a priority for them, James responded affirmatively again. This is certainly good to hear. I don’t doubt their skill or knowledge, and I’m heartened to read about James’s security-conscious bullheadedness. Back in February, James found himself in a similar situation to the one I feel like I’m in now:

Despite this being an incredibly serious security issue, nobody really seemed to care. Oh well. […] Yes, [this example] is relatively unimportant security-wise (except that if there’s a man-in-the-middle, he now has credentials to access your [data], which may or may not contain [your] secrets — but I digress). Eventually I remarked that despite the relative unimportance of [this example, the developer] is a leader in the ruby community, and leaders should set good examples.

I strongly agree. As James reminds his Twitter followers, “Broken gets fixed, but shitty lasts forever.” Truth! And that’s a really, really good point.

When it comes to FetLife.com itself, there seems to be far too much talk and not enough walk.

Of course, that wouldn’t be some shocking betrayal, but rather confirmation of what should be a very obvious thing few seem willing to recognize: FetLife is just like any other social media company. By investing far more heavily in new features than in the very basics of security, FetLife behaves just like Facebook. In itself, that doesn’t bother me. (Well, not anymore than I’m bothered by Facebook generally, that is.) What bothers me is that FetLife says they’re behaving differently when they’re not, and then relying on people’s relative technical ignorance to get away with that.

FetLife keeps saying it’s a “community” site for people to meet and network and build stronger community ties. It goes out of its way to distinguish itself from seedy hookup sites, and even claims to limit some of its search functionality to prevent that behavior. But can we trust that FetLife, as a company, cares more about our privacy than about the next new feature? If not—frankly, I don’t—ask yourself: under what circumstances would you prefer FetLife got pressured into prioritizing user privacy and security? Pressure from its own constituents who have its improvement in mind, or pressure from its economic or political competitors, who have its destruction in mind?

FetLife is not a community. FetLife is a business. Only fools confuse the two. Yes, FetLife’s robes are said to be made of the finest cloth. But the Emperor is naked. And the whole people will one day say, “He has nothing on at all.”

Email conversation with FetLife

Subject: Privacy concern: FetLife’s session handling does not invalidate old user sessions
From: maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>
Date: June 14, 2011 10:57:53 PM PDT
To: privacy@fetlife.com

To whom it may concern at Protose, Inc.,

I have some concerns regarding FetLife’s handling of its users’ session cookies. Specifically, it appears authentication cookies that I receive from FetLife never expire and thus, if stolen, can be used to access my FetLife account even after I expressly log out of the website. I recorded a brief video that showcases this issue at the following address:

http://maybemaimed.com/tmp/fetlife-cookie-expiry-tests.mov

In the video, I use a cookie obtained from FetLife on June 9th. The video was recorded on June 14th. The video shows that FetLife still considered the cookie valid at the time of recording, even after I logged out of the service. I’ve also been able to log in to FetLife using the captured June 9th cookie from other browsers on other computers.

It is troubling to me that FetLife does not invalidate session cookies when I log out of the service. Shouldn’t that be done to ensure old sessions can no longer be used? Regardless, how long does FetLife consider session cookies valid? Is there any expiry time enforced on the server? If so, what is it?

I could find no evidence of any such expiration and as a result I am deeply concerned that theft of a single FetLife session cookie could theoretically grant unauthorized access to my FetLife account for the lifetime of my account.

If indeed there is no expiration, then this effectively offers session hijacking persistence to even one successful “sidejacking” attack against a FetLife user. As I know you are aware,[0] since FetLife currently does not support HTTPS-only browsing, every request by a logged-in user for a resource on FetLife.com exposes the user’s authentication cookie to the network. Worse, once the attacker hijacks a victim’s session, since FetLife.com never asks users to re-authenticate to perform any action (like changing one’s password), compromising a single cookie effectively fully, silently, and permanently takes over a FetLife.com account.

Given the prevalence of cookie theft,[1] the highly sexual and thus sensitive nature of FetLife.com users’ content, and the persistence of even a single successful attack, I feel it’s critical to address this issue urgently. What, if anything, is FetLife planning to do to resolve or at least mitigate the severity of an account breach like this?

If I understand FetLife’s architecture correctly, then it is possible a resolution to the issue is as simple as a one-line fix, which is documented in §2.8 of the Ruby on Rails Security Guide:[2]

“If you use the popular RestfulAuthentication plugin for user management, add reset_session to the SessionsController#create action.”

I’ve prepared a blog posting describing this issue to non-technical users. My plan is to publish in one week’s time, but if I receive a notice that FetLife is taking steps to resolve this issue, I’ll delay publishing for some more time if you’d like. I’m writing you before I publish specifically because I don’t want to unnecessarily endanger FetLife users (including myself!), especially as there is nothing we can do to resolve this particular concern ourselves.

Thank you for your attention and for prioritizing your users’ privacy and security. I think FetLife.com has become an important cultural phenomenon and I feel strongly that it needs to do everything possible to protect its users from attacks.

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

EXTERNAL REFERENCES:

[0] http://twitter.theinfo.org/78611275625676800
[1] https://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/11/online-services-security-report-card
[2] http://guides.rubyonrails.org/security.html

From: James Lennon <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>
Subject: Re: Privacy concern: FetLife’s session handling does not invalidate old user sessions
Date: June 15, 2011 10:15:27 AM PDT
To: maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>
Cc: John Baku <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>

Hey [maymay],

Thanks for emailing in about this issue. Actually, it’s something that we were aware of, but preferred to solve in a different way. Unfortunately, because of the way that we store our sessions, expiring them is a lot more complicated than it sounds. And in any case, it’s the wrong solution to this problem.

The correct solution is to implement site-wide SSL. If the cookies are protected from the network, there’s no particular need to expire them. We do delete them from users’ computers on logout.

We are working on getting site-wide SSL going, but unfortunately, it’s not entirely within our control. We have partners who we have to work with, and their timelines are somewhat out of our control. We are leaning on them as hard as we can, but it’s probably going to take another 60-90 days for us to be ready to start rolling this functionality out to the community.

I’ve prepared a blog posting describing this issue to non-technical users. My plan is to publish in one week’s time, but if I receive a notice that FetLife is taking steps to resolve this issue, I’ll delay publishing for some more time if you’d like. I’m writing you before I publish specifically because I don’t want to unnecessarily endanger FetLife users (including myself!), especially as there is nothing we can do to resolve this particular concern ourselves.

I really appreciate your enthusiasm. It’s clear that like us, you have a great deal of passion for the kinky community. If you really want to help us get this functionality out the door, encouraging your audience to support FetLife would be a huge contribution you could make. Offering SSL to our growing community is a very expensive proposition for many reasons.

So, please give us a couple of months to get all the pieces of this SSL project together; we’re actively working on it. If you do decide to publish the article (obviously we’d prefer that you didn’t), we’d really appreciate some warning.

Thanks again,

James Golick

Subject: Re: Privacy concern: FetLife’s session handling does not invalidate old user sessions
From: maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>
Date: June 16, 2011 8:49:22 PM PDT
To: James Lennon <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>
Cc: John Baku <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>

Hey James,

I’m glad to hear you’re already aware of the problem. I’d hoped you were, since it seems like such a basic issue. That said, I’m disappointed by your response.

You wrote that, “If the cookies are protected from the network, there’s no particular need to expire them,” but I think this is a very dangerous mindset. While it’s certainly the case that implementing site-wide SSL would close the most trivial cookie theft vulnerability (and that’s good!), the fact of the matter is session cookies can be stolen in a number of other ways. Moreover, I fear you have missed the point of my concern when you said that “We do delete [cookies] from users’ computers on logout.” The whole reason for my concern is that, if my cookie is stolen, I can’t delete it from the *thief’s* machine!

Again, I want to stress that my concern is not solely with the lack of SSL and that implementing SSL, while definitely helpful, is not a panacea by any means. If the server never enforces some kind of expiration on session cookies, it is still the case that the theft of just one cookie would irrevocably give an attacker total control over my FetLife account. Just because a session cookie was *transmitted* securely doesn’t mean it’s trustworthy *forever*.

Enforcing some kind of reasonable expiry on these session cookies is not outlandish. I feel that failing to do so exposes me to an unacceptable level of risk when I use FetLife. I believe that if laymen users were aware of the situation, it would be unacceptable to them, too.

I’m also sorry to hear that resetting sessions is not as easy to accomplish in FetLife’s case as I hoped. While I’m sympathetic to the complexity of your situation, I also know this is not an unsolvable problem. Especially considering the expertise the FetLife team has in this area, and the extremely personal nature of users’ content, I feel it’s important that FetLife urgently adopt a defense-in-depth approach here.

There are concrete steps FetLife can take that would frustrate an attacker, even if those steps wouldn’t remove all risk. I feel you are obliged to take at least some of these steps if indeed you want to claim that FetLife is a secure and private place for the average user, especially as most of them are posting sexual content. Doing things like asking the user to at least provide their old password when they change it to something new would significantly mitigate concerns here.

My point in bringing this up is that the lack of security precautions *within* the FetLife walls are equally troubling. FetLife’s reliance on the perimeter security of the login form is dangerously over-confident.

Finally, while I can also appreciate your need for funds, I can’t in good conscience recommend that anyone financially support FetLife while I know it has such lax security practices. FetLife needs to implement appropriate security and privacy measures for its users *before* I’ll feel justified encouraging anyone to pay for it.

Since there are numerous things FetLife can and, as I’ve argued, should do to more adequately protect user privacy prior to going SSL-only, and since you say you’ve been aware of these concerns for some time, I don’t feel comfortable waiting 60 to 90 days before posting about the issue. Unless you show me that you need a reasonable amount of time to implement some basic precautions, I still plan to publish a post explaining my concerns and describing the technical details to non-technical users next week (on Wednesday, June 22nd). It doesn’t seem like implementing session cookie expiry times or at least asking for re-authentication on a request to perform major actions, for example, needs to wait another 3 months.

Thank you for taking time out of your day to correspond with me about my concerns. I really do appreciate that FetLife offers a valuable service. I just also hope you take a closer look at the broad assumptions you’re making regarding your security measures in the context of the unique role FetLife plays in our communities.

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

From: James Lennon <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>
Subject: Re: Privacy concern: FetLife’s session handling does not invalidate old user sessions
Date: June 17, 2011 12:23:47 PM PDT
To: maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>
Cc: John Baku <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>

We are working on building another mechanism for session storage, but it’s non trivial, and requires a hardware order for capacity. We’re doing our best to get this out the door as quickly as possible, but again, it’s not a trivial problem to solve to store and then migrate hundreds of thousands of sessions in a durable way (as this is going to introduce 500+ req/s worth of additional load on whatever datastore we choose, we don’t have the capacity to spare on our current MySQL cluster). I very much doubt this is going to be shipped by Wednesday, but we are working on it.

Subject: Re: Privacy concern: FetLife’s session handling does not invalidate old user sessions
From: maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>
Date: June 18, 2011 4:37:37 PM PDT
To: James Lennon <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>
Cc: JohnBaku <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>

Hey James,

It is *very* good to hear that you’re working on another (presumably) more secure mechanism for session storage.

Are you also working on implementing some of the simpler things that doesn’t require new hardware but would still mitigate these concerns somewhat? I already named some: ask users to supply their old password when they perform sensitive actions (like updating their password); add an “expires at” timestamp that gets checked and updated on page load to cookies you send right now so they don’t last forever.

These are just two things you can do without fundamentally re-architecting your session store or making expensive hardware purchases and they would greatly enhance security for FetLife users. If you roll out these two improvements by Friday, June 24th, I’ll wait another month and a half (45 days, until August 8th) for you to implement default site-wide SSL for all users before publishing about this issue. Otherwise, I’ll still publish during June.

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

From: James Lennon <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>
Subject: Re: Privacy concern: FetLife’s session handling does not invalidate old user sessions
Date: June 19, 2011 10:55:58 PM PDT
To: maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>
Cc: John Baku <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>

Hi [maymay],

I’ve discussed our practices with a few of my friends who have security backgrounds, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

I’ve deployed a change that expires session cookies 1 month after their last request. We’re working on code to require the current password when changing your password. And when we implement that, we’re also going to expire all of your existing sessions when you change your password by putting a unique token in the session cookie that expires when you change your password. This way, if somebody’s account has been compromised, we can easily expire all the existing sessions at the same time we change the password to ensure that control of the account is restored.

With those changes, implementing another session storage mechanism shouldn’t be necessary. We won’t be able to delete sessions on logout, but once we implement SSL, that won’t really be a relevant concern. If the user’s machine is compromised, the attacker is going to have an easy time getting their username and password anyway. And will almost certainly have access to the user’s email, and therefore our reset password functionality.

- James

From: James Lennon <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>
Subject: Re: Privacy concern: FetLife’s session handling does not invalidate old user sessions
Date: June 21, 2011 10:15:52 AM PDT
To: maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>
Cc: John Baku <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>

All of these changes, aside from SSL have been deployed, tested, and rolled out.

From: maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Privacy concern: FetLife’s session handling does not invalidate old user sessions
Date: June 23, 2011 2:46:09 PM PDT
To: James Lennon <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>
Cc: JohnBaku <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>

Hi James,

I just had a chance to look at the changes you describe. They’re good to see! I’m particularly glad to see you at least asking for a user’s current password when changing their password to something new.

I’ve also verified that you’ve indeed invalidated a user’s session cookie when said user changes their password, but I noticed this is only the case if the cookie data itself includes the new, unique tokens. The numerous cookies I saved before you implemented this change still allow me to access FetLife without logging in, same as before, essentially treating the new cookies with their unique tokens as though they are optional. When will you ensure FetLife session cookies lacking the new unique tokens are invalidated, too?

Thank you for implementing the mitigating features you have so far. I think they’re an important step for FetLife users.

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

From: James Lennon <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>
Subject: Re: Privacy concern: FetLife’s session handling does not invalidate old user sessions
Date: June 23, 2011 3:01:33 PM PDT
To: James Lennon <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>
Cc: JohnBaku <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>

Hi [maymay],

We’re going to phase out the old cookies in about 30 days. The last time we mass expired all of our sessions, we received so many support emails that it took our team months to get out from under them. We’re giving our users a month to use their sessions again (as soon as you use your session, you receive both of the new tokens). Then, we’ll make ‘em mandatory.

- J.

From: maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Privacy concern: FetLife’s session handling does not invalidate old user sessions
Date: June 23, 2011 3:11:06 PM PDT
To: James Lennon <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>
Cc: JohnBaku <[REDACTED]@fetlife.com>

Hi James,

Sounds good. I look forward to no longer being able to use my saved cookies after this July . :) And, shortly thereafter, to site-wide SSL on FetLife.

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

1. Here’s how you might start to decode the cookie using Python:

   >>> import urllib >>> t='BAh7CjoQX2NzcmZfdG9rZW4iMTRmMjdTcDNqUE9HTXNUdWo0UmlMSmxjOGg4ckxuZzhzTEY1V0QwUEVHS1E9Og9zZXNzaW9uX2lkIiVkOWMyZDYzOGI0ODU4MDI5MDlhNzRjMzRmZjQ1MmJkNzoUY3VycmVudF91c2VyX2lkaQOfow4iCmZsYXNoSUM6J0FjdGlvbkNvbnRyb2xsZXI6OkZsYXNoOjpGbGFzaEhhc2h7AAY6CkB1c2VkewA6FGFiaW5nb19pZGVudGl0eWwrCEq1JAICAA%3D%3D--a8128aa96ed5da1ec9d4fda35f1ad366d8ea21f2' >>> data=t.split('--')[0] >>> hmac=t.split('--')[1] >>> urllib.unquote(data).decode('base64')'\x04\x08{\n:\x10_csrf_token"14f27Sp3jPOGMsTuj4RiLJlc8h8rLng8sLF5WD0PEGKQ=:\x0fsession_id"%d9c2d638b485802909a74c34ff452bd7:\x14current_user_idi\x03\x9f\xa3\x0e"\nflashIC:\'ActionController::Flash::FlashHash{\x00\x06:\n@used{\x00:\x14abingo_identityl+\x08J\xb5$\x02\x02\x00'>>> hmac'a8128aa96ed5da1ec9d4fda35f1ad366d8ea21f2'

   See Wikipedia’s article on HMACs for more detail about that part of the cookie.

2. I was able to go from never using the tool to writing a working Firesheep handler for FetLife in under 20 minutes. Here it is.
3. For example, since IE won’t honor host-only cookies, it’s more vulnerable to a poisoned DNS cache. It’s also more vulnerable to “cookie jacking” via UI redressing attacks, which is also an example of an attack that site-wide SSL will not protect you against.
4. View the whole Twitter conversation on one page.

And it's go boys go
They'll time your every breath
And every day you're in this place you're two days nearer death
But you go…

Well a process man am I and I'm tellin' you no lie
I work and breathe among the fumes that tread across the sky
There's thunder all around me and there's poison in the air
There's a lousy smell that smacks of hell and dust all in me hair

—Great Big Sea

I want to put all this—this blog, my other one, my interest in yours—away. And I’ve felt this way for a while. And I’m so sorry.

I’m sorry because there are so many things I still want to say. In recent months, my drafts have exploded from around 10 to over 30. I wanted to write in greater detail about how the BDSM Scene made me feel unwantable; I wanted to write praise for the older submissive men on whose shoulders I stood; I wanted to write an analysis of how and why “creepers” are attracted to, incubated by, and remain in the Scene; I wanted to write about the night at the club when I experienced the closest thing I ever have to sexual harassment and how awful it felt; and I wanted to write about why, despite the disdain oozing from my flesh, I now feel an immense swell of compassion for the person who kept touching me after I said “no.”

I wanted to write about the people who send me private letters of support, and also the ones who find it necessary to share their delusions that I rape young boys. I wanted to write about the BDSM Scene as the closest thing I’ve known to a cultural home, and how important having that is to me. I wanted to write about why I fear that putting all this away would feel too much like self-imposed exile, and why I want to put it all away anyway.

So, day in and day out lately, I write but do not publish. Though reticent to let it show, I am very often scared of all this. And yet, I feel called to these tasks like a moth to a flame.

There are so many reasons why.

Puny Kingship

In mid-April, shortly after I published my “unreal” experiences at the Kink, Inc. Armory, a comment reading simply, “Thoroughly predictable,” was left by someone calling themselves “Sexually Opulent.” The pseudonym was a simple clue; it was the 38 year old self-identified dominant man I had quoted early in the piece. Minutes later, his FetLife profile contained the following writing:

So here he goes again, and since he’s decided to use parts of our conversation in the public sphere, here is the whole thing. Mind you, it took him saying something like the following to make me call him out publicly for being such a fucking weak-ass male submissive that he makes male submission look bad:

[full page HTML, archived here]

Yeah, you’re a paragon of sociability. You ignore the logical arguments and spout opinion. Now you’re spouting intuition as being as valid as an observable fact, have the only negative quotes in your new blog entry being from VISITORS to the armory rather than from employees, and completely miss your own sexism when saying you questioned your gender identity because of your submissive ideas, something akin to saying a woman who likes being on top should consider if she wasn’t actually meant to be born with a cock. And let me make this clear to you, if it’s that hard to stay alive, perhaps you should consider the alternatives.

Although it remained up for a while, I recently noticed the post was deleted. But since his reaction was another perfect illustration of the very poison I wrote about, I snapped several screenshots (and even saved a .webarchive for Safari users) to ensure his attitude—so you think I’m “a fucking weak-ass male submissive,” do you?—would be captured in perpetuity. I am drawn to this flame because I will not permit him—I will not permit you, Fistandantilus—the luxury of running from your own words, and I am no moth in your cowardly light.

To all who’ve tried to intimidate me: Thank you for teaching me why there exists more strength in my greatest vulnerability than exists in your most powerful outburst.

While I do gain a certain satisfaction from such encounters, these are merely proving grounds for my own parrhesiastic experiments. I accord such sparring partners only a bare minimum of care; they are poisons in the air. When they are fearfully cowed to, indifferently subsumed, or revered like kings of their petty, puny hills, The Scene, a far too unctuous and aristocratic environment both, is an abuser.

Heroes’ Muse

In early June, I opened my email and there was a letter addressed to me:

Hi MayMay

I googled up Male Submission Art the day before yesterday to find pictures for a friend, and ended up reading your blog for almost an hour.

[…]

I like that you gather material exalting the physical form and emotional concept of the submissive man, material that addresses the submissive man as a beloved individual and as a sex object, because I’m fucking sick of the unending kink porn drivel that tells me that as a female-bodied sexually dominant person, I’m supposed to base the sex I have with male-bodied people around devaluing my partner’s desirability. I want my partner to submit to me because he is desirable, because I adore him. Why would I ever want to push a person to their limits if I don’t have care nor curiosity about what that person is made of? Why would I want to have someone spread out for me if I’m not fascinated and delighted by what’s being made available? How can I trust someone to let me hurt them if we can’t communicate with each other on a human level about what we’re doing? I really struggle with feeling like I don’t want to label or disparage people for whom the mainstream femdom thing works, but speaking privately… you know, uh, to a stranger, like you do… I just fundamentally cannot understand this bullshit.

I’m also tired of scanning messages from submissive guys who don’t see me as a person, and who don’t or can’t imagine themselves being simultaneously submissive and valued, but are looking for — I don’t even know what, for a vagina-bot in stilettos, for both of us to fill empty roles based on gender essentialism and dehumanization. I love that you are adamant that it’s not enough to settle, that you want something that’s true and, as much as I tend to roll my eyes at this word, authentic. I’m really sad that you’re not finding what you want and need, because I can’t help but think that you can’t be the only one who feels this way, just like I know that other people like me exist, and many struggle to untangle their genuine desires from having been twisted or silenced by gender training. I suspect you must stand for others who may arrive at the party of human sexuality bright-eyed only to finally leave disillusioned, letting go of the hope of fulfillment, or settling for less than what they deserve.

And I’m just so mad about it! Fuck that, the entire thing, because it’s totally, totally stupid.

Yeah, I think that’s pretty much what I wanted to say. So I hope you had a good day, and from my friend’s incoherent, glee-filled phone call a minute ago, she appreciated the pictures I grabbed from MSA. I told her to go check it out when she gets a chance. There really are tragically few resources for me to point her toward, which, really, sums up the whole damn thing.

This person is who I accord care. They are nobody’s hero—except mine. While they are unseen by and often in The Scene, they exist, damnit, and they matter and they are the goodness in the future!

On a personal level, this email has been my answer to the question of what and why I’m still even here, still alive—and still writing—in a poetic-literal sense. But it’s also why what I’ve come to call the Work will never be “done.” The day I stop getting emails like this on a regular basis is the day I will no longer be drawn to the tasks that inspired them.

While nothing I do will ever be enough, in the face of that feeling I can at last feel that I have done something. I’m getting copied. A lot. Kind of all over the place. In places I didn’t even know existed. Places I don’t even have the mental equipment to access; another thing I wanted to write but have as yet failed to do.

At a recent BDSM munch in Berkeley, a young person introduced herself to me. “Hi,” she said, offering a handshake and stating her name. “Hi,” I responded, shaking her hand. “I’m maymay.” She froze momentarily, still holding my hand, and I saw recognition cross her face. Then, smiling, she said, “Awesome.” We spoke for a while, and she told me of how she once got a comment on an old MySpace blog from someone who signed up specifically to leave the comment. The comment said simply, “Thank you for writing what you did; it helped me.” That’s when she became another of my heroes.

I look around now and I see even more personal heroes, a multiplicity of thought-replicants. Stabbity is writing great rants in the style of the sorely-missed Bitchy Jones. Thanks in part to Dev’s significant piece on the topic of devaluing male submission, discussions about it have flourished in a number of places, including look-alike venues whose rhetoric I despise. There’s also a whole interview series with submissive men in which the issue is a recurring theme. Even whole new blogs with the premise are sprouting.

Heroes make me happy.

Replicant Offspring

It’s no accident my heroes were birthed by the Internet. “Sexual reproduction,” as Donna Haraway wrote, “is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function of the system environment.” In what can perhaps be viewed as an ironic technological re-appropriation of sexual determinism, I have impregnated The Scene’s spaces using cybernetic replication; other people’s minds offered presequenced cultural genetic material, instruments to engineer a more humane culture. The act is pleasurable, certainly, though crude and often still uncomfortable.

In desperation, denying parts of my own didactic lust for corporeal sensation, 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.) My persona is now so thoroughly projected on the thin surface of cyberspace that I feel offering you this digitized dossier has cost me the depth of my life. Yet it has also rewarded me with a kind of awkward attractiveness I could not attain when decoupled from my electronic prosthetics.

By the same reasoning, it 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. And, still borrowing from Haraway, ”illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.”

And I feel Haraway was prescient in more ways than this. You, my heroes, are also cyborgs, for you are simultaneously everywhere and invisible. So if you are also my replicants, then you are blessedly illegitimate offspring, too. I hope you will be as unfaithful to me as I have been to our shared cultural ancestors.

I now believe the identity of a “submissive man” is at best of limited use; exuberant, perhaps, but taxonomic rather than expressive. In her succinct deconstruction of Chela Sandoval, Haraway writes:

Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of colour. She notes that the definition of the group has been by conscious appropriation of negation. For example, a Chicana or US black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identities, left out of even the privileged oppressed authorial categories called ‘women and blacks’, who claimed to make the important revolutions. The category ‘woman’ negated all non-white women; ‘black’ negated all non-black people, as well as all black women.

In applying this to myself and the specific microcosm of deliberate erotic megalomania in which I was socialized, it feels a parallel trajectory: A submissive man has heretofore not been able to speak as a man nor as a submissive person. Thus, within The-Scene-as-The-State, his is also an amalgamation of forced-negative identities that inevitably fluctuates along multiple spectra in ways that do not conform to gender role stereotypes. He could be neither submissive nor a man at the same time; his kink is necessarily queer.

I think this holds because The Scene’s “revolutionary authorial” categories are overwhelmingly “submissive women”, while its “privileged” categories are overwhelmingly “dominant men”. So trapped partly by my own self-projection, which by its very literal nature is multifetal since I’m concurrently in my own space as well as volatile and hostile arenas, I constantly experience a maddening multidimensional dissonance. That my dissonance—and my dissidence!—is caused by (specifically categorical) privilege in some contexts and its absence in others is simply another layered irony.

But our broken sexual identities—submissive man, dominant woman, what have you—are not served by having Scene-State figureheads at all; I’ve been documenting entrances when I should’ve been documenting exits! I’m too visible, acrid, and incorporeal to change The Scene, anyway. Perhaps you, my invisible heroes, would be better suited to that task.

Refuge in Diasporic Exile

As June came to a close, I visited Portland to volunteer for a tech conference, and someone who knew me far better than I knew them invited me into their new house, and then I felt a way I didn’t know I could feel again: they caned me, and I loved it. I wanted more, and harder. It was more desirable pain than I’d felt in years, the first time in a long time I’d felt good about playing a way I’d craved for so long.

I wish I had words to describe it, but all I have is this unceremonious picture:

When I look at this photograph, the emotional intensity I recall and the objective inanity I see have me feeling trapped in an endless tug-of-war. “Don’t you get it?” I want to scream at anyone who doesn’t. I want so much more than this momentary banality but this is all I get. This is such a sentimental photograph to me because it shows a moment unfairly difficult to find, something made out of reach, and something I could only touch again for a brief moment. And it is simultaneously such an agonizing photograph to me because it shatters the self-consoling aplomb I had of living my life without it.

Yet I cannot imagine this photo holding any significance to anyone but myself, and perhaps some of the people who care about me. It’s not particularly beautiful or well-lit. It is not retouched or cropped, nor particularly intentionally posed or composed. I am not an especially beautiful model in it—I don’t even know how to be, for a picture—nor are my marks remarkable, even by my own history. There is no way this picture would and, worse, no reason this picture should get any love on FetLife’s Kinky & Popular feed, for instance.

I deeply resent the “privileged shits” who belittle this mundane sacredness, who don’t understand why I’m terrified of publishing this picture in the first place, or why I’m doing it anyway. I’m jealous of others’ sociosexual ease (where they have it), but more so of the cornucopia of sex they inhabit regardless of whether or not the horn of plenty is a mirage; more than anything, I’m jealous of their access to a symbology for signaling desires and boundaries to others. How can I ever hope to feel whole when I can’t express submissiveness for fear of signaling meekness, nor desirous for fear of signaling aggression?

I desperately want to have sex and play and lay with lovers, new and as-yet-undiscovered. I hate The Scene because I cannot kneel and feel confident I am seen for who I am—even in my own bedroom, even, no, especially by my own eyes. This black lung is the ugliest part of me.

Further, a personal irony makes things harder: my Work itself was what made me not only attractive, but noticeable enough to have even the opportunity for such play in the first place. In Portland, in bed, as we laughed together, they whispered in my ear: “I had this idea that playing with you would have to be so serious.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah,” they said. “You’re maymay.”

In other words, when I move through The Scene, I’m no longer one of the dime-a-dozens. I could have a puny hill, too, now, if only I’d wear that contemptible crown. But I don’t want it, even as I know others would love to have it, because breathing the air there tastes like oil.

Recently, FeministSub asked me a poignant question:

do you think the BDSM community is capable of change and do you feel motivated to be one of the people that helps make that happen?

I evaded answering because I was scared to admit the extent of my true feelings publicly: like all governances obsessed with power, this Scene-State is fundamentally callous. It’s not immune to the toxins in general society, it amplifies them—but it’s also the source of vital yet unrefined antiserums for general society. That’s why I can’t find it in myself to light the match, but if I were to witness The Scene ablaze today, I would not move to stop its destruction. Instead, I would watch with bittersweet sensitivity as the closest thing I knew to a cultural home burned. Because maybe, if there is enough fire, eventually there won’t be any flames left to draw me back here at all.

And in my awkward, cataclysmic final fantasy, I’d distill this sentiment to explain why many people far more forgiving, far more generous, and far more compromising than I wrinkle their noses at WIITWD all the time. They’re correct to do so. If my genuine sorrow at that fact is a mystery to a community that declares itself well-versed in reconciling paradoxes, then that community isn’t just self-selective and self-protective, it’s self-delusional.

A Lighthouse in the Park

So, all this being said, here’s what I’ll do: I’m going to the park, and I’m inviting you—yes, you—to join me to hang out for a while. It seems to me that the kind of kink-friendly people I want to meet, as well as the ones who seem to have the things I most want, occupy a liminal space between public Scene and private clique. If a humane cultural home exists for me at all, it exists there, and I need to recenter myself at the permeable edge of that voluntary intersectional diaspora.

I’m going to the park because it’s not Wicked Grounds, or a munch, or a party. You’re still invited if you like those other places, but I want a less polluted environment. After all, “if the only available patterns for kink emphasize something a person doesn’t like, then that person will probably avoid kink.” And that’s who I want to meet; you’re who I really care about, anyway. Even if The Powers That Be don’t believe me, I know there are many of you out there, somewhere.

So, I’m going to the park. And I’m bringing my juggling clubs, and maybe a book in case you don’t show up (that’d be okay, too), and maybe some fruits and berries if I can find fresh ones on the cheap to share, in case you do show up. Because I’ve already spent too much time doing things I didn’t want to. And I deserve to feel fulfilled in every way, but not because I’m special, not because I’m “maymay.” I deserve it because I’m just like you.

I’ll be at Golden Gate Park, at the big lawn in front of the Conservatory of Flowers on Sunday, August 7^th, around 3:30 PM.

As I’m wont to do, my article explores the intersection of gender, sexuality and technology. Since this topic is so broad, the strict word limit was a real challenge. But I like such intellectual challenges. The following is a reprint of my contribution, but don’t let the fact that you’re reading my piece here stop you from exploring SsexBbox’s new mini-blog/online magazine and its other intriguing contributions.

Gender is a text field, by maymay

In one hand, as developmental psychologist Gertrude Wyatt once remarked, the “symbolic transformation of bits of reality into language [is] part and parcel of the individual’s ego development.” If we can accept that, then finding our own words is more than merely good communication, it’s literally necessary for growing up human. There is no more universal human experience than that of describing one’s own identity.

In the other, as “wrongologist” Kathryn Shulz said, “the miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is. It’s that you can see the world as it isn’t.” This is no more profoundly expressed than through our species’ incredible use of technology, the force of which transforms the impossible into the possible. We have reached a point where arguably the most fundamental of God’s gifts to humankind—words—have come full circle.

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. And as new technologies are developed, technology itself mimics its creator.

Except, that is, in at least one very crucial arena: the description of ourselves. To our technology, our genders are among our most baffling human properties. The binary coarseness with which our technology encodes this information should serve as a humbling reminder to anyone arrogantly proclaiming humanity’s superior intelligence; if your laptop’s screen can display millions of colors, why can your Facebook profile only display one of two options for gender?

Today’s standard for such things is defined in the International Organization for Standardization’s specification titled “Information technology — Codes for the representation of human sexes,” referred to as ISO 5218. This worldwide standard, most recently updated in July 2004, defines 4 mutually exclusive options: “male”, “female”, “not known”, and “not applicable”. It’s a simple scheme that takes a total of 2 computer bits to record.

That’s woefully inadequate—and we can do better. But how?

One early attempt called “Yay! Genderform” offers you 947 options using checkboxes, which allows you to combine each option with any other option for “a total of 1.1896×10285 or 1.1 quattruornovemgintillion possible combinations, more than there are elementary particles in the universe. If each option were a computer bit, it would take 119 bytes to encode a combination.” Though a good illustration of the problem space, staring at an interface of 947 possible boxes to check isn’t merely practically unusable, it fails to free us from the flawed paradigm’s constraints: we need to break out of boxes altogether.

A simple interface can be a gateway to endless possibilities. Take, for example, Google’s famously simple homepage; using just a single text field, Google gives you access to the entire searchable Internet. So, too, can a text field access the symbolic gender galaxy—or at least a coordinate within it.

The words we use to communicate are the tools with which we teach each other—and our software—about ourselves, who we are, who we like, and why. Designing sexist systems might sound brain-dead, but it’s actually how many people think of gender issues in their mind. They quite literally don’t see different humans as being equal; when two men marry, they need to figure out “which is the wife” and so they literally imbue the code they write, and the technology they build, with rigidly gendered, technically inaccurate world views.

Ultimately, it’s up to us to build a world where we can either limit or accept the possibilities of the people we interact with. Therefore, we ought remember Internet pioneer Jon Postel’s Law: “be liberal in what you accept.” Put another way: don’t limit us with boxes, because, as Eddie Izzard said, “there’s gonna be a lot more guys with makeup during this millennium!”

Formerly a professional web developer, maymay is now a social justice technologist whose work primarily intersects with issues of digital civil liberties and sexual freedom. He is the co-author of Foundation Website Creation and AdvancED CSS, the founder of the sexuality education conference series KinkForAll.org, and host of the KinkOnTap.com Internet radio talk show. His seminars on technology and sexuality have been featured at conferences from coast to coast, and he prefers couches to hotel rooms. Learn more at maybemaimed.com/cv.

As usual, please feel free to republish this article at your whim, so long as you don’t do it in any place that requires a financial commercial transaction to access (unless you get permission for that, first), and so long as you link back here. Thanks very much.