Monday, June 9, 2008

Sexism at Large in American Politics: Armed and Dangerous

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM safety, Masculinity, Politics of sex, Sexism, Vanilla life

I’ve never been extremely thorough about pursuing political current events, but I’m finding myself ever more personally withdrawn from American politics now that I’m living in Sydney and no longer living in America. However, I actually feel more knowledgeable about American politics now than I did when I lived in New York City, mostly because local people here won’t stop asking my opinions on things.

It’s funny to me, how much Australians are interested in the happenings in America. I suppose that makes sense, but as an American who (like the stereotype) never really realized how much of an influence America was to the rest of the world, it’s taking me a little by surprise.

Anyway, needless to say, I’ve been keeping up (a bit) with the Democratic national primary. It’s hard not to. The whole world was practically sitting on the edge of its seat wondering who will win. A black man or a white woman as candidates give rise to only two topics in the right’s conservative hypocrisy: racism and sexism.

This was such a heated race that I’ve even received regular emails from some people in my extended family about it. Their emails are extremely strongly-worded short essays with arguments as to why I should or shouldn’t vote for Obama or Clinton (though mostly only because of the candidates’ opinions on Israel, which I couldn’t really care much about anyway). I’m thinking of telling them to start a blog.

I really have no opinion one way or the other about the merits of either candidate—I’m simply not very well informed. That said, Debra Haffner linked this 5-minute video produced by the Women’s Media Center showcasing myriad clips of all the sexist remarks made about Hillary during her campaign. I rarely link videos in this blog, but this one is worth your time.

There’s a lot of sexist language harassing women in this video, since its goal is to showcase how the media is sexist against women. However, that’s just half the story. There’s at least an equal if not greater amount of sexist language in today’s media against men since, obviously, most public political discussion happens about and between men. Where’s the highlight reel of political pundits proclaiming that some candidate “doesn’t have the balls” to do something brave?

One reason I’m more than a little withdrawn from politics is because I know I’ll never be elected to public office. Even if I had the aspirations, I would simply never survive a smear campaign. I mean, look at this blog!

Indeed, back in the “good old days” when I used to stay at Paddles, the local NYC public BDSM club until 4 AM, that was even a joke. The lot of us, my friends and I, would stumble up the stairs in the dark and then burst out onto the street like mole-people, bleary eyed from a long night. We used to joke with another, “Well, I’m certainly not running for public office after tonight!” the implication being that we’ve done yet another thing that would get us booted immediately if the word got out.

While this threat is meaningless to me, since I don’t want to be in public office anyway, I have met more than a few people over the years for whom this is a real concern. They remain anonymous to this day precisely because they do, at some point, want to be in public office in order to make our government better, and most of them don’t even want to get into the areas of sexual rights. They’ll never have a blog like this, though, because having a blog like this—doing what I’m doing right now—means I’ll never win a race for public office.

But hey. I still get to vote. And of course, I will.

Comments (3)

Sunday, May 11, 2008

CBT? WTF is up with that?

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM psychology, BDSM terminology, Cock and ball torture (CBT), Femdom, Foot worship, Male sexuality, Myths and misconceptions, Stupid dominants, Stupid submissives

I just got an email I thought was pretty funny. In it, the sender implies a conspicuous lack of an item from my toy collection: weights. I mean, doesn’t everyone have weights, at least for cock and ball torture?

Actually, no, I responded…and why would I? I don’t actually like cock and ball torture that much. I don’t really mind cock and ball torture—I mean, it can be fun and all and I’ve done it and stuff, hell I’ve even felt Eileen pierce my ball sack with a needle and poke my penis a bit with one, too—but I just don’t really enjoy it. It’s not a fun kind of pain for me. I just don’t get off on it.

Even if I did, though, would I really need to go out and buy special weights specifically for the purpose of dangling them from my genitals? Eileen’s response to this idea was something along the lines of, “Why the fuck would I spend money on that? There’s tons of shit in my house that’s heavy and tons of ways I could attach it to you. I am way more creative than that.”

Evidently, this sort of attitude is nearly unheard of for submissive men. It’s one of those things, right along with foot fetishism and a desire to be forcibly feminized, that many people tend to automatically assume every single man who is submissive must be into. I mean, I must at least have a weight for cock and ball torture, right?

You see this everywhere. Cock and ball torture is probably in every single stereotypical representation of BDSM that I’ve ever encountered. Women, usually women dressed in stereotypically shiny outfits, who are kicking, punching, slapping, poking, clamping, or otherwise delightfully abusing the male genitalia. Again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Like I said before, if this is the kind of yodeling garden-gnome sex session you want to have, be my guest, but don’t assume that I’m going to want to do it with you.

And while I’m on the subject of yodeling garden-gnome sex, I’m sure there are a lot of dominant women who aren’t particularly enthusiastic about the idea of cock and ball torture, either. Like chastity and orgasm denial, this is so often just one more unbelievably penis-centric fantasy that the men who perpetuate the stereotype don’t even stop to think about what’s in it for their partners.

Cock and ball torture is so common, actually, it’s got an acronym: CBT. I kind of like this acronym, though, because it means I get to snicker quietly to myself when the HR director says something like, “Maybe we should invest in that CBT package to help our employees understand the new database system.” Of course, she’s talking about computer based training, which actually gives my filthy mind even more awesome fantasies in the office.

Anyway, I find the whole thing to be rather a big nuisance. It’s a little like going to a big city, New York for example, and assuming everyone you meet is a fan of the most well-known sports team, say the Yankees, right off the bat. Most of the people you meet are actually not going to be huge baseball fans at all, and some of them might like the Mets instead. Obviously, making the assumption that everyone you meet is a Yankees fan is kind of dumb.

Well, so is the assumption that all submissive men like CBT, or feet (which I think can be beautiful, but are often very silly looking). It’s more likely to make you look like an ass than anything else. So my advice is the same as it’s always been: stop treating sexual situations so differently from the rest of your life; if you’re not walking around making assumptions about sports teams based on where I live, stop making assumptions about my sexual preferences based on my submissive orientation.

Comments (8)

Monday, April 21, 2008

The Gadfly publishes an interview with myself and the VP of CV

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM psychology, BDSM safety, BDSM terminology, Beginner BDSM, Community, Masochism, Sex

This is probably old news to a lot of you, but for those who don’t keep up with news from Conversio Virium, I wanted to direct your attention (however briefly) to the latest issue of The Gadfly, Columbia University’s undergraduate philosophy magazine. As part of their Winter 2008 issue, the Gadfly has published excerpts of an email interview that Tyler, the current Vice President of Conversio Virium, and I agreed to do with Stephanie Wu, the Gadfly reporter.

I think the article, which is titled Tie Me Up: A Gadfly Interview with Conversio Virium and begins on page 13 of the PDF, came out really well. I hope it gives CV some more positive exposure to the Columbia University community, and to other colleges and universities as well. Here are a few choice samples:

Gadfly: Are there ways to think about pleasure and pain apart from the classic continuum defined by opposites, with a line in between marking the transition? Is the relationship between pain and pleasure actually circular?

Maymay: I think there are as many ways of thinking about pleasure and pain as there are people thinking about it. When you generalize, you begin to see that more people share classic opinions than those who share the radical ones, but that is true of anything, not just pleasure and pain. People who do SM often find themselves broadening their own awareness of what kinds of interpretations of pain and pleasure are possible, thereby increasing their own maturity and capability to navigate the world around them.

It behooves us to be humble, to acknowledge that we don’t know as much as we think we do. SM doesn’t suggest a relationship between pain and pleasure. On the contrary, SM challenges the relationships science, theology, morality, and other cultural norms have already established about pain and pleasure. SM doesn’t aim to indoctrinate, SM aims to free us from such indoctrination.

[…]

GF: Besides an interest in pain, what commonalities do the activities covered by BDSM share that are unique from other sexual interests?

MM: These things are grouped together largely because there is no other space where people can talk about them. Not even the Queer clubs do enough to educate people about how to practice these forms of sexual activity safely (both physically and emotionally) and consensually, and that’s okay as that’s not their place. These activities are grouped because they share a common physical theme. This is rough sex. Like a sport, people can get hurt. Like a sport, people can become very skilled in doing it in a safer, more effective manner.

You can read the full interview (PDF) over on the Gadfly’s web site.

Comments (2)

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Why Orgasm Logger? Well, why not?

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM psychology, BDSM techniques, Chastity/Orgasm denial, Communication, D/s dynamics, Humor, Myths and misconceptions, Orgasm Logger, Personal history, Politics of sex, Sex, Sexual teasing and control, Technology

This is majorly cool: Viviane linked Orgasm Logger in her Links for January 4th, 2008 post and it’s since been picked up by Boinkology, and a few higher-profile bloggers are beginning to display Orgasm Logger counters on their sites, too, like Tom Paine. A few months ago, a search for “Orgasm Logger” revealed only a handful of hits but now Google shows over 1,300 results, which is quite a bit for a project I put a single night’s effort into months ago primarily for my own, personal use.

I’ve also been seeing discussions about Orgasm Logger surface on message boards and other blogs every so often. It’s a lot of fun to read through the discussions people are having and to see what they’re saying about it. Here are some telling examples.

This woman, on an Informed Consent discussion thread, says:

Having orgasms isn’t a competitive activity, it’s just something that happens, or doesn’t and it certainly shouldn’t be used as a measure of anything. In my opinion.

I have to say I agree with her regarding her view on the usefulness of orgasms as a competitive measure, but I disagree that it shouldn’t be used as a measure of something. Measure of what is the question. Well, I think that’s up to the person doing the measuring.

I never think of orgasms as competitive, just a lot of fun. They’re fun to have, and they’re fun for some of us not to have, and the fact that some of us are having more than others is also a lot of fun for some of us. I don’t think there’s anything in this world that turns me on more reliably and so thoroughly as watching my lover have a screaming-good orgasm. For me, when she has ten or twenty, or maybe even a hundred and I haven’t had one, that’s an even sexier thought. I like the disparity in the numbers, but I don’t feel competitive about it.

Naturally, kinky people into chastity play and orgasm control see the value of this tool really quickly. Later in the same thread, another woman writes:

I think the ‘logging’ idea would be a nice little extra feature for those who do chastity play.

And then another guy echoes her sentiment:

I can imagine it might be of use if a man were in a sort of chastity arrangement without a device i.e. based on trust, and monitored by a domme at a remote location.

Curvaceous Dee is (fittingly) ahead of the curve by already having experienced first-hand the intent of Orgasm Logger:

It was a great relief to finally come again. The very useful Orgasm Logger has confirmed to me over the past few months what I’d suspected for a while—that I like to get off every couple of days. Doesn’t matter too much whether it’s self-pleasure or pleasure with partners (both have their moments), but, almost like clockwork, every two days on average will see me gushing, groaning, and generally feeling great. Which explains why I’m always running out of ‘bedroom towels’….

Indeed, as she points out, keeping track of stuff let’s you know more about that stuff.

Here’s another blogger’s comment, one I really love:

I clicked, and found out this guy had his last [orgasm] 3.58 days ago, and this is a feed from an actual Orgasm Logger site! What an add-on to one’s blog! The ultimate in advance orgasm management strategy systems!

The ultimate in advanced orgasm management strategy systems? I think this blogger coined a new acronym: OMSS! Naturally, I can think of dozens of improvements to Orgasm Logger so I’m not going to be calling this thing “the ultimate” any time soon.

Of course, Lux of Boinkology said it best:

We’re both fascinated and confused by this application

In fact, that’s been the most common reaction, and it’s really interesting to me. Long before I created Orgasm Logger, I’d just been naturally keeping a tally on my orgasms. It seems to me like most everyone does this, if only not as mindfully as I do. Of course, what made me mindful about keeping track of my orgasms in the first place was my near-fetish for orgasm control, in a sexually submissive headspace.

I got really serious about keeping track of my orgasms about two years or so before I created Orgasm Logger. At first, I simply wrote down when my last one was, so I’d always know. Then I wanted to be able to easily share that piece of information with Eileen, so she’d be able to know whenever it interested her. To make that happen, I started recording my orgasms as events on my personal calendar, publishing those events as an iCalendar to a local WebDAV server I run for the two of us here at home, and then subscribed her iCal to the calendar feed I was publishing.

It worked flawlessly. Now I had a real database of all my recorded orgasms with embedded date and time, location, and participant information! It was pretty much all I needed. But it wasn’t perfect.

It didn’t do the things I was most interested in, which was tell me at-a-glance how long it had been since my last orgasm, the most personally interesting datum. I had to do that calculation every time I wanted to know. What’s today’s date? When was the date of my last orgasm? What’s the difference between then and now?

Obviously, computers are the answer to computational problems, so I started thinking about how I could get the computer to do everything I wanted. In the process, it occurred to me that lots of people heavily into orgasm control are always talking about “how long it’s been” or “what their last one was like.”

Hell, people who aren’t even kinky are talking about their orgasms left and right, up and down, inside and out, this ways and that ways! Moreover, the entire political debate over contraception, abortion, teen pregnancies, abstinence-only sex education, and a host of other issues, are all centered around exactly this topic: orgasms!

None of this would even be happening if it weren’t for orgasms, but I’ve yet to hear someone acknowledge that simple fact. It’s as though, if you were an alien, you’d think orgasms were what made the world go ’round, but nobody was allowed to talk about them directly.

Which brings me to my point. Orgasms are really important for a lot of people. What’s interesting, then, is why it’s so puzzling to so many people that I’ve made a tool to help people keep track of them. After all, throughout history, the one thing people have continued to do with nearly no change in behavior at all is come up with ways to keep track of the stuff that’s important to them.

No value judgement, no assumptions, just an awareness of what’s important to people and the benefits that can be garnered from using increasingly sophisticated tools to broaden that awareness. That’s what Orgasm Logger is about, for me. That’s what I think everything should be about, on a philosophical level.

No one would have looked at me askance if I wrote improvements to banking software, because money is very important to a lot of people. That’s why it’s tracked so rigorously. That’s why it’s used as a competitive measure of status, of wealth, and of many other things, even though a lot of us think that it shouldn’t be.

Why, then, do orgasms seem so out of place? Maybe the answer to that question is also the answer to a lot of other things that we as a country, a culture, and a species, are struggling with. Maybe understanding value, understanding why the things that are important to us are important, things that are currently so deeply ingrained in the cultural tropes of our society that we don’t even realize we can question, will help us in ways we can’t even imagine today.

That’s what I’m puzzling over.

Update: News of the existence of Orgasm Logger is still spreading, and it’s still getting the typical, puzzled and, in some cases, even hostile reactions I can pretty much expect from the mainstream world-at-large. Latest sighting was at a site called Dear Sugar.

Comments (9)

Friday, January 4, 2008

America’s Sexual Sampler Platter: Everything but Me is on the Menu

Category labels: BDSM in the media, Bitter and jealous, D/s dynamics, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Rant, Sexism

I get that New Years is a time of resolution, a time when people feel compelled by the time of year to make themselves better. The holidays are over, all that weight is back around your midsection, and there’s never been a better time to get back in shape, to stop that bad habit, to become better with women, to…on and on and on.

On the second of January I received an astonishingly fitting pair of postal letters. The first letter was the new catalogue of The Stockroom, one of the largest online sex toy retailers, and the second letter was from a local church that promised me blessings for using their special prayer rug. Dear readers, I kid you not! Of course, I promptly tossed the Jesus-decorated prayer rug in the trash, flipped through the Stockroom’s catalogue until I got bored seeing women tied up, and then gave it to Eileen, since she’s far more excited by that idea than I will ever be.

I suppose it should strike me as not at all odd that I’m seeing a disturbing influx of sexist, incendiary material fill every possible orifice of my news feeds. Most infuriating of all is that it’s not even that much more than usual, which is to say that the litany of aggravating material I’ll briefly discuss below is far more often the rule rather than the exception and that, itself, is the most depressing thing about them.

First, via The Sex Carnival, this Boinkology post links to SellYourSexTape.com with more cheerful humor than I could ever muster. It showcases with quite explicit flair exactly how marginalized a sexuality like mine is, as if there wasn’t enough of that already.

[…]if you want to make the big money ($2000, for the curious), you’ll have to document your sex life for an hour a day for an entire week, making sure to keep it interesting. Bonus points for shots of “daily life” and minimal shots of the boyfriend — this is straight porn, after all.

Oh, and kinksters need not apply: “Sex scenes should be natural and loving and happy, no violence, but don’t forget the money shots! Do not include anything illegal or “obscene”. ie. no interspecies, no golden showers, no forced sex, etc.”

Once again we have these time-honored, incredibly insulting assumptions about porn and sexuality. Men consume, women are the product. Anything that isn’t straight, hetero-normative sex is “unnatural,” or “obscene.” Rougher, more “violent” sex is okay so long as it’s the woman on the bottom, for “the money shot,” but if you can call it kinky then it’s immediately cut. No concern is ever paid to the woman’s sexual satisfaction, as long as we get to see the man ejaculating. Also, we don’t want to look at men because men aren’t sexy, they’re just facilitators; a man’s value is in his finances.

In an even more mainstream outlet, Tom found the kicker when he came across AskMen.com’s recent article called, of all things, How to Dominate and Dominant Woman. Augh! As Tom put it rather succinctly:

Because, you know, [women] all secretly want to be submissive. Not to mention that they will respect men who do this.

I could barely get through the introduction to this article without gritting my teeth:

We often associate dominant women with whips, chains and a pitiful man groveling at their feet while licking a pair of vinyl boots. This certainly occurs with some regularity, but you may be surprised to learn that dominance doesn’t always translate into sadism. On the contrary, many dominant women play the superior role in relationships simply because their man hasn’t learned how to dominate them. She may be strong-willed, feisty and independent, but this doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to be ravished like any other female might. If you’re ready to take charge in the bedroom, the following tips will show you precisely how to sexually dominate a dominant woman.

It’s precisely this kind of narrow-mindedness that keeps both men and women enslaved to gender ideals that make only a very small percentage of real men and women happy. In one fell swoop, this introduction alone manages to insult just about every possible orientation I can think of, including submissive men (by calling us “pitiful”), dominant women (by implying they should be playing an “inferior” role in a relationship), and dominant men (by stating rather explicitly that not dominating a dominant woman means they haven’t been ready to “take charge” yet). I think the only insult I’m not seeing is one aimed at submissive women—but that’s probably because they’re so inconsequential anyway that their influence doesn’t really matter in the first place.

(Elizabeth, please do an 87-part series on this. Please. PLEASE!)

From yet another corner of the blogosphere I was shown this “orgasmic experience simulator” that, while obviously someone’s idea of a joke, basically denigrates the male sexual experience as devoid of diverse value even though it seems to be making fun of the female orgasm at first glance. The simulator is a simple two buttons, one for experiencing orgasm as a male and another as a female. Click the male button and your browser window shakes just a smidgen and you’re presented with the following JavaScript alert box:

Total Time (including undressing, dressing and somking a cigarette): 58 seconds

Press the female button and you’re guided through numerous jump-through-the-hoops alert dialogues that ends in a climactic window-shaking experience. This is an example of the prevalence of the misguided belief that men are all the same, the same belief that has that disgusting AskMen.com article thinking the only submissive men are pitiful examples of masculinity.

But wait, there’s more!

Lolita found a video about which she asks “is it bondage porn, or an Agent Provocateur video?” Once again, all I see is blatantly misogynistic understandings of sex, with (once again) submissive women centerfolds. What’s striking about this instance is that it is so obviously an advertisement directed towards both men and women, yet it is still women on which the camera unapologetically focuses throughout the entire video. The message is, once again, crystal clear: it’s the female form and only the female form worth embracing for the singular purpose of abating the carnal desire of men.

Poor, hapless, helpless men, one might think! In both the vanilla world and the kink world men are treated very much the same: as victims of their own biology, always thinking with the wrong head. Control sex, it’s thought, and you control a man, because sex is worth more to men than anything else. How much more? Good question!

Thankfully, Eileen showed me this post of Bad Man’s that links to CostOfSex.com, which has a handy calculator to show us exactly how much time, effort, and money men spend each day on their high-priced hookers called girlfriends and wives. Oh, and hookers. Can’t forget the hookers. The takeaway from this link is that the message of men-as-monetary-value and women-as-sexual-value is so ingrained in men themselves, that they are taking a perverted sense of pride in their efforts to get the most sex for the least amount of money. That is, after all, exactly how men are taught to prove their manliness!

Lest you think that it’s only people like you and me who can see the sexism here, note that the CostOfSex.com calculator is courtesy of a site that calls itself Mr. Sexist. They sell T-Shirts. Want to know my favorite?

I’ve got an 8-inch thick wallet.

I do realize cultural and sexual progress doesn’t happen at the blindingly fast pace that we’re all used to technological advancements happening, but, seriously…if this is what 2008 has in store for me, I’m going to keep wishing I could hibernate until 3008 rolls around. Again, I do realize some of these are jokes—and yes, they’re kind of funny in that “I’m only half-joking” sort of way. What hurts me right now about all of these things is the insurmountable disparity of privilege in regards to sexual power—in what ways power is or is not okay to be shared or expressed—that results in the stigmatization or, worse, the invisibility of submissive men like me (and, for that matter, dominant women, too).

Will it really take ’til 3008 to stop hurting?

Comments (4)

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Rope bondage video of the day

Category labels: BDSM in the media, Bondage, Chastity/Orgasm denial, Femdom, Humor

This video has everything. Bondage, begging, a super hot blonde dominatrix, and cookies! :) When I shared this find with Rona everyone over at her blog got a real kick out of it, so I thought I’d share it here, too.

All the begging totally put the idea of Cookie Monster orgasm denial porn in my head. “Make a choice, Cookie Monster, do you want this delicious cookie or an orgasm?” Tee, hee, hee!

Comments (4)

Friday, December 14, 2007

An Exemplar of Conservative Hypocrisy

Category labels: BDSM in the media, Communication, Politics of sex, Sex, Sexism

Today I woke up to a lovely, lovely thing in my inbox. It was a Google Alert that pointed me to an article called S&M, Ivy-League Style published today by FrontPage Magazine, which I’d never heard of before now. It looks like Conversio Virium, the Columbia University-supported BDSM education group that I have done a lot of volunteering at, has piqued the interest of conservative author and psychiatrist Miriam Grossman. Of course, even though Grossman has very few positive things to say about us, this kind of warms my heart because it’s concrete evidence of the impact I’m having on the world.

The article Grossman wrote is a prime example of political rabble-rousing, a do-nothing, say-nothing example of sensationalist reporting that uses that ever-convenient excuse, “just to warn you about the danger, wink wink.” Strewn throughout the article are not-so-cleverly disguised threats designed to frighten uninformed readers while doing absolutely nothing to actually impart some kind of knowledge about the issues at hand.

As usual, Grossman doesn’t miss the opportunity to lump all kinds of sexual practices into one steaming pile of “beware of dog!”, including threesomes and swinging, right up there with BDSM. Oh, and let’s not forget the repeated association with STDs. (“Only sinners get STDs!”) The fact that the only thing these three sexual activities have in common with one another (aside from the fact that they are all valid examples of human sexual behavior) is that they’re unpopular with the author is conspicuously missing from this article, which sarcastically purports to tout “awareness” as a noble goal:

“What does BDSM have to do with health?” I asked.

That, by the way, is exactly like asking “What does sex have to do with health?” but I’ll give Grossman the benefit of the doubt for the moment and assume she’s simply ignorant about the subject, in which case I’ve got an extensive reading list for her to peruse.

In any event, the article continues:

“Well,” I was told, “it’s just good to be aware. Just so you’ll know what it means if it comes up in conversation.”

Princeton students seeking further “awareness” may turn to another Ivy League resource. Columbia University’s popular GoAskAlice.com is staffed by health educators. […] You’ll find queries here from outside the Columbia’s community as well, including high school students.

Oh noes! This means that high school students are asking sex questions. Why is that news to anyone? And more topically, why shouldn’t they be asking sex questions? Also, why is it that the kinds of questions high school students are asking are the same kinds of questions college students are asking? Has Grossman stopped to consider that perhaps this is so because neither high school nor college students are getting the kind of exposure to sexual health information that they need to get their answers? Questions such as “how do I tie someone up safely” that the educators at GoAskAlice.com and Conversio Virium have answers to.

For “real” answers and “awareness” I suppose we should read Grossman’s book, Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student, which is described on her web site like this:

Our campuses are steeped in political correctness—that’s hardly news to anyone. But no one realizes that radical social agendas have also taken over campus health and counseling centers, with dire consequences.

Psychiatrist Miriam Grossman knows this better than anyone. She has treated more than 2,000 students at one of America’s most prestigious universities, and she’s seen how the anything- goes, women-are-just-like-men, “safer-sex” agenda is actually making our sons and daughters sick.

Dr. Grossman takes issue with the experts who suggest that students’ problems can be solved with free condoms and Zoloft.

I have to agree with her on the point that all health problems cannot be solved by giving out free condoms and Zoloft pills, but I don’t think any safer-sex educator I know is doing only that and nothing else. Furthermore, the implication that they are is once again an attempt at harmful fear-mongering. The evidence to the contrary is, ironically, in her own article, which actually quotes (but does not link to) the CV web site, as well as choice tips of practical advice from the Go Ask Alice column. Minutes browsing either of these web sites will reveal useful, practical resources, something that is unsurprisingly lacking in her own articles.

Instead of practical advice, what does Grossman offer?

HPV, herpes, and chlamydia are silent epidemics; for each person with symptoms, there’s at least one without.

Just so you’re aware. In case it comes up in conversation.

Well, gee, Dr. Grossman, thanks for playing “who wants be a big scary monster.” And you know what, you’re sadly right about that fact. Those STIs are silent epidemics, and who do you think we have to thank for that? That’s right, viewers like you.

Grossman uses medical facts to restrict people’s choices, enslaving them, instead of empowering them as she claims to want to do. This is an exemplary circumstance of conservative hypocrisy at work. Scare scare scare, shun shun shun, it’ll free you and you’ll be so much happier when your only choices are the ones I’ve pre-screened for you!

In her press releases, she writes about the biochemistry of bonding, and specifically of the role of oxytocin in making people (well, women) feel trust. Young men, of course, naturally release enough testosterone to save us from the Pavlovian effect of injections of oxytocin that sex produces:

You could say that we are designed to bond. Neuroendocrinology is suggesting that Heather’s feelings about her “friend” are based in her biology and that inadvertently she has attached in a powerful way with someone whose last intention is to bond.

So according to Miriam Grossman, women (poor, tender, fragile females) are biologically more emotionally vulnerable than men, and that’s not a politically-correct thing to say. How, exactly, is that not a gigantic leap of faith rife with assumptions about women’s emotional makeup proven incorrect by the vast diversity of emotional responses women have to sex? Furthermore, how is that not politically correct? Stating that women are more sexually vulnerable than men is the definition of the politically-correct attitude towards women! However, blaming that sad fact on biology and discouraging sexual freedoms for women only makes things worse.

But wait, there’s more:

In all her years of sex education, Heather never heard of oxytocin. When she logs on to Planned Parenthood or the popular health Q&A site GoAskAlice.com, she finds a celebration of sexuality—as long as it includes latex, of course. She’s led to believe that when it comes to sexual urges and desires, experimentation and exploration will only increase her self knowledge and well-being.

This approach is not based on hard science. Instead it reflects the presence of social agendas in the fields of health and counseling. These social agendas promote the ideology that anything goes between consenting adults, that latex protects, that men and women are the same, and that abortion is basically a benign medical procedure. It’s not PC to challenge the hooking-up culture or to demonstrate that we may be hard-wired to attach.

At first brush, it might seem like Grossman wants social ideologies out of psychiatric practice. That sounds reasonable. Upon closer examination though, she’s managed to touch on no less than six (6!) social agendas herself in just these two paragraphs. These are namely,

  1. that sexual self-exploration is dangerous and to be discouraged,
  2. that only approved forms of sex should be allowed between consenting adults,
  3. that the free distribution of condoms contribute to negative sexual experiences,
  4. that women and men should be treated differently based on their sex,
  5. that abortion is bad, wrong, and unsafe,
  6. and that monogamy is the One True Way to Love®.

Wow. Way to be a sexist hypocrite. She could win contests. Somebody give her an adorable Kelly green Chlamydia plush toy. It’s her favorite.

One True Way to Love is a registered trademark of oppressive cultural conservatives. All rights reserved.

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Thursday, December 13, 2007

‘Sexually uninhibited’ is PC for ’slut’

Category labels: BDSM in the media, Communication, Community, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Sex

“Sexually uninhibited” is a phrase that rubs me the wrong way. Why? There’s nothing wrong with being sexually uninhibited, is there? I mean, what’s bad about being uninhibited at all, anyway?

One problem I see with the phrase, though I’m not sure how to avoid this, is that it implies that sexually inhibited is the norm. Otherwise, why would one even need to mention that they are sexually uninhibited? Of course, perhaps being sexually inhibited is the norm for most people in America, but doesn’t it seem like using words to describe oneself that reinforce harmful stereotypes is, well, harmful?

When taken literally, there’s nothing wrong with the phrase itself. What’s wrong is how it’s used, that is, it’s always used to describe women and never men. I mean, if I called myself “sexually uninhibited” (disregarding the accuracy or inaccuracy of that statement for just a moment), it would be weird. I mean, I’m a guy. Aren’t all guys sexually uninhibited?

First of all, fuck, no! Guys can be just as prudish as women can be. Sexual inhibitions have nothing to do with biological sex. This seems like it should be one of those “duh” moments for most people but for some reason it’s an “aha!” moment instead. (Kind of like the way some people are shocked to learn that boys have body-image issues, too, and that not all of us want to look like Tarzan or The Rock. The fact is, not all men are the same.)

I know I have some sexual inhibitions, like being decidedly uncomfortable with what most people call “casual sex.” Sussing out why is really hard, but the fact remains it’s clearly an inhibition. But just because you may be comfortable with “casual sex” doesn’t necessarily mean you’re uninhibited, because what if this one-night stand of yours wants you to go down on her, and suddenly you realize you’re not comfortable doing that (for whatever reason). In this case, this example person is comfortable performing one kind of sexual act but not another. Can he be considered sexually uninhibited, then?

Secondly, what does being sexually uninhibited even mean? The words literally mean uninhibited in matters of sex, which should simply imply doing what you want to do in a relaxed and natural way, that is, free of inhibitions. Instead, however, it’s often used to mean promiscuous, “slutty,” indiscriminately sexual. In this way, the usage of the phrase is tied to amounts of sex rather than choices regarding sex.

This is a really big mistake, and I’m not just talking quality over quantity here. Having inhibitations or the lack thereof are directly related to doing what feels right, and twisting that into a measure of how much sex one might be having completely destroys any hope of self-empowered decision-making. Everyone’s probably pretty familiar with how this impacts women—the virgin slut double standard, the inseparable association of female sexuality with money, and on and on—but do as many people see how it impacts men?

Since men are supposed to be sexually uninhibited anyway, being inhibited at all is always seen as a problem, when in fact it may not be. Sometimes inhibitions, especially when they are thoughtful and voluntary, are very important protective mechanisms. It becomes very difficult for many men to say no to sex (such as in this funny example), even though they may not feel comfortable with the situation. They feel that doing so would challenge their sexual orientation (“must be gay”), or their gender identity.

Socializing generations of men who can’t say no to sex is just as bad as socializing generations of women who can’t say yes. It gives nobody the freedom of making their own choices.

Moreover, what is sexual in such a context? One of the problems with the way sex is understood today is that it only applies to a very narrow definition, even in alternative sexuality communities like BDSM. This was made most public as far as I can tell during the Monica Lewinsky sex-scandal, in which a debate over what actually constituted sex was the national headline for a year (a year!). Everyone was asking everyone else, “Did a blowjob count as sex? What do you think counts as sex?” The only good thing about this discussion was that it was actually about having sex.

Personal opinion aside, the point remains that the whole fucking country (literally) was trying to standardize on some idea of what sex is or what it isn’t, as though we’d have eventually come up with a good definition that everyone can agree on and then things would be simple from then on. Well, sorry to break it to you, but sex isn’t that simple.

This is all a symptom of the ignorant belief that sex can be defined solely by activities (what people do) instead of also being informed by intent (why they do it). Once again, sex and education prove to be the two topics that otherwise smart people behave in very stupid ways about, because ask any educated person what the difference between manslaughter and murder are and they’ll tell you it’s intent without a second thought. What they won’t be able to tell you as easily is that so too can intent define a sexual act and separate from something else, like, say, rape, which is an act of violence, not an act of sex. (As an aside, here is an interesting anecdote regarding the rape-as-violence theory: Also, rapists aren’t necessarily driven by sexual desire; a lower sex drive won’t prevent attacks that are motivated by a desire for power. This quote from Castration Anxiety: Can A Sex Offender Still Have Sex After Surgery?.)

And yet, even in the S&M community, fond of its pain-as-sexual-pleasure activities and which should be aware of this fact better than most, there are still debates about what sex is, what it isn’t, and why that is so, only rarely ever acknowledging the vast diversity in the kinds of sex people actually have. BDSM isn’t sex, we’re fond of saying, it’s something “more.” That’s just another way of saying, “it’s something else.”

Sounds to me like quite a few self-professed “sexually uninhibited” people have quite a ways to go before they are as free of their sexual inhibitions as they say they are, is all I’m sayin’.

Comments (7)

Monday, November 26, 2007

MaybeMaimed.malesub

Category labels: BDSM in the media, Politics of sex, Technology

Here’s a (cough) brilliant (cough) idea: culturally-based top-level domain names (TLDs) for the Internet.

If approved, .LAT will become one of the first TLDs based on an ethnic group instead of being limited by country. The first, according to Keenan, was .CAT for Catalonians (for those not familiar, Catalonia is an autonomous community within Spain). With a new TLD approval process coming in 2008, .LAT and .CAT could be just the beginning of a bigger wave of domains focused around culture and lifestyle. We may one day see TLDs like .GLBT or .BIKE for the gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans and cycling communities, for example. The question is: who plans to beat me to applying for .NERD?

Here’s my concern. A top-level domain is technically a container, an element of the domain name system (DNS) that segregates one thing from another. When the proposal for the .xxx domain name appeared from the conservative politicians it was clearly aimed at making censorship easier by putting all “adult content” inside a giant kennel, one that is easily filtered and blocked. The pornography industry ultimately (and rightly, in my opinion) fought back against this idea and prevented themselves from being so easily cornered—because they had the money.

Accepting a culturally-based domain name feels like putting a giant red bull’s eye symbol on your back. Not that there can’t be benefits to organizing as a visible community, because you know I think there are. I just don’t think questions of content should be encoded into the world’s telecommunications infrastructure as what amounts to big electric fences.

From an (ignorant) user’s perspective, I don’t think more top-level domain names are a good thing either. They add confusion to a situation that already has too much of it. A good example is the absurd idea of having top-level domain names for ultra-local geographic areas, such as the proposed .nyc TLD for New York City.

Compare the notion of a web site at the address info.nyc versus an identical web site at the address nyc.info. I mean, come on, the latter even sounds logical when you say it, and it leaves the playing field open for other cities perhaps not as high-profile as New York City to provide their own information web sites. That way, it also becomes trivial to intuit the locations of all sorts of information web sites about cities: tel-aviv.info, tokyo.info, and the like.

Furthermore, stuffing more and more crap into top-level domain names creates a situation where important context is lost. Consider, for instance, our government-sponsored municipal information web site example. Compare nyc.info versus another possibility, say info.nyc.ny.state.gov. They both can lead to the same information, but with the latter (and longer) address, you know exactly where you are: the information web site of the city of New York in the state of New York run by the (American) federal government. NYC.info could just redirect, or the sites could be mirrors of each other. The point is, with the latter scheme, you can drill further still, envisioning: health.info.nyc.ny.state.gov, and so on and so forth.

But what do you think? Will a .glbt domain become a rallying point or a ghetto? What about .malesub, or maybe .femdom?

By the way, for those interested, there are actually alternative root DNS servers (effectively creating other Internets) that you can configure your computer to interact with, if you are becoming as fed up with the folks at ICANN as I am.

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Monday, November 26, 2007

While fucking, I prefer to get fucked

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM psychology, Bisexuality, Bitter and jealous, Erotica and pornography, Gender fluidity, Masturbation, Politics of sex, Sex

This began as a comment on Bitchy Jones’s recent and wonderful post (in typical “rock-the-boat” fashion) on how awesome getting fucked is, but it spiraled into a bit of a longer remark. It expresses a sentiment so frustratingly common in me that I’d rather keep it here. You know, for posterity or something.

Bitchy’s a self-described “dominant slut.” That is great (really); I’m all in favor of pulling stagnant gender binaries out of the penetrative experience of sexual power play. (Penetration being equated to power was first discussed when strap-ons made their debut in my corner of the blogosphere.) Bitchy basically made the oft-but-never-oft-enough-made argument that any sexual act is not inherently dominant or submissive, kind of like this:

it wasn’t being penetrated itself that was submissive. It was just that all femininity was equated with submission - that everything a woman did in sex had been made to look as if it was a priori submissive.

But there is no way that such simple basics – being the hole or the plug – are on their own submissive or dominant. It only has further meaning in context.

Then she talked a lot about how awesome getting fucked is, kind of like this:

You know what I fucking love? I fucking love to get fucked. […] I like fucking for the same reason I like hitting men, looking at bondage porn or eating steak and chips. I like pleasure.

So I suppose I’m a submissive slut, and I’m happy to say so. I like fucking, too. Catch is, (and I hate that I have to qualify it) even though I’m a guy, my dick just gets harder for the getting fucked part way more than the doing the fucking part. Kind of like Bitchy. In fact, except for all the dominant context, exactly like Bitchy.

Sometimes I have to wonder where men like me fit into the picture. Here’s a hint: It’s not here.

A guy who prefers to get fucked instead of preferring to do the fucking. Well, that’s hardly a mystery: “Must be (a) gay (bottom).” Or, “must be a sissy.” Or, “must not be an alpha (aka. best kind of) male.” I can’t even begin to imagine how I might defend myself against these things because that would imply that these things are bad to be (they’re not) or that they aren’t true (parts are, though they’re not universally true).

I’m not gay, I’m bisexual. I’m not a sissy, but I’m clearly not the hegemonic masculine man, either. I’m not what sociologists would describe as an “alpha” personality, but I can piss on the alphas with the best of them (and I’ve had to in the past). Often I feel that nobody bothers to look at this nuance. Robert Heasley, a gender theorist, began exploring some aspects of this in Chapter 5 of Thinking Straight as what he calls straight-queer men. While some of what he writes about strike very close to home for me, I am not straight because there’s that whole quibbling eroticism of homosexual encounters thing.

So I’ve never known what language to use while doing any soul-searching, or how to present myself so others know what to make of me sexually. I never felt like I had a place in either mainstream kink or femdom kink, so I keep trying to make something up.

I might naively say “I’m just me,” but I refuse to accept that I’m just that unique. I’m not that special (no matter what my father keeps trying to tell me). There are other men like me—and if you’re willing to put some money down on it, I’d bet there are lots of them. But, let’s get back to the having sex part.

I like fucking. I like it when I’m getting fucked on my penis. Yes, that’s perfectly possible. When I’m talking about getting fucked, I’m not necessarily talking about getting penetrated. A man with an erect penis can actually get fucked—fucking or getting fucked does not have a one-to-one relationship with one’s anatomical genitalia. That said, I don’t see why men who top shouldn’t be able to get it up the ass if they want to. Again, topping or bottoming does not have a one-to-one correlation with whether you are the “active” or “receptive” partner in a sexual encounter. So, it follows, that I also like getting fucked in my asshole.

Hell, if it weren’t for all the “must be gay (or a sissy)” crap which not-gay and not-sissy submissive guys (i.e., that’s me, in case you lost track) are pelted with all the time I might have even felt like I got the best deal of all: I have a plug and a hole to use while getting fucked. Actually, I have two holes if you count my mouth, and I do. It sounds like the perfect recipe for a foursome to me, and I bet you can figure out how I’d put the puzzle pieces together. (I always liked Tetris.)

Only, frustratingly, very few other people seem to be putting the puzzle pieces together the same way I am. This leads to some very upsetting experiences, like trying to jerk off to stuff that instead of turning you on increasingly makes you bitter. Yeah, I thought that was pretty fucked up, too, but I’m going to save that rant for another entry.

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