Tuesday, August 18, 2009

There Is No BDSM Mecca

Category labels: Bitter and jealous, Community, Kink events, Personal experience, Stupid dominants, Stupid submissives

In the past month-and-a-bit, I’ve touched down in San Francisco, found a studio apartment to rent, and began looking for some kind of employment. (I’m still looking, actually.)

My first BDSM event was a “Peer Rope Workshop” at the SF Citadel that Fivestar, an amazingly talented rigger and self-bondage enthusiast, alerted me to. Amid the hustle and bustle of looking at apartments and walking around the city I want to call home, I planned to go to the event and meet up with Fivestar there. I had no expectations, only the fears that my overall abysmal experiences in New York and Sydney would be repeated, and the hope that somehow, in some way, San Francisco would quickly prove itself better for me than these other places.

It’s early still but suffice it to say that after that first peer rope workshop a little over a month ago, while I still have hopes for finding a job, making something of a life, and finding friends here—and not “BDSM-scene friends,” most of whom I cannot actually stomach even for a single night—I’m pretty convinced that there simply is no BDSM mecca. San Francisco has a reputation for being one of the best places on the planet for freely expressing all kinds of sexuality, and yet I still feel like I belong on some other planet.

The SF Citadel is an unassuming building. After I entered, paying my $5 so-called “donation” (for seriously, why don’t people just call it a fucking admissions ticket), I joined the folks seated on a bunch of couches and talking amongst themselves. Introducing myself, I met a number of people, whose names I can’t remember and with whom I had no substantial conversation at all. I was doing my best not to begin drawing analogies between the people there and the people in New York I fled halfway across the world and now across the country to avoid.

Eventually the workshop was due to start and the facilitator ushered everyone downstairs.

“Does anybody not have a partner?” the facilitator asked after a very familiar introduction. I raised my hand. He pointed behind me at a woman sitting in the corner, also raising her hand. “Turn around and say hello!” he instructed me. So I did.

“Are you a bottom?” the single woman asked me almost immediately.

“Yes,” I nodded. “You, too?” She nodded in response. “Cool,” I said, feeling rather undeterred. “Want to switch off tying with me?” I offered.

The woman shook her head so vehemently I thought she might vomit on me in an instant. “Oh, no,” she declared. “I don’t do that.”

I wanted to ask why, but her response was so adamant that I lost any interest I might have had in speaking to her. I tried to keep talking anyway, asking her something or other about something I care so little about I can’t even remember what it was. As pairs of others began uncoiling rope around us, she went on to tell me about the venue’s pet dog and how the dog was her friend, a story I overheard earlier in the evening and which she later repeated yet again to a man who arrived some time after our conversation lulled. The woman quickly offered herself as “a victim” to this man, and she soon found herself in rope.

I hung around Fivestar for the rest of the evening, at first watching and later helping to spot Fivestar’s self-knee suspension. (As an aside, Fivestar really is quite amazing with a bunch of rope. Watching self-bondage has never been so inspirational before, but when I watch Fivestar, the evident technical ability I witness simply makes me want to get better with rope myself.) Ultimately, I was happy to get the opportunity to interact with Fivestar more, which was my initial reason and motivation for showing up in the first place, although much of what Fivestar was doing was just not within my understanding and thus somewhat frustrating.

As the evening progressed, the workshop facilitator called out to the group, “So, as you’re learning now, tying up boys and girls is different.”

In the next instant, a tall man wearing a ripped black t-shirt standing in front of a bound, nearly naked woman called back, “Yeah, girls are fun to tie up!” I breathed a deep sigh of frustration and rolled my eyes, and most of the rest of my head, with what was very probably too much volume. I admit, I passed judgement on this man then and I decided I don’t like him.

I’m well aware that the biggest factor in whether or not I have a good time at these things is myself. I’m not patient or forgiving, and I’m predisposed to think the worst about the BDSM community, and many of the people in it. It takes an immense amount of energy and constant vigilance and mindfulness on my part to put these painful things out of my mind in any situation, old or new, public or private. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don’t but, I swear, I always try.

Out one night with Sarah Dopp, who generously treated me to dinner and ice cream earlier that week, I started thinking about how I’d like to present myself in this new city, how to position myself professionally, socially, and so forth. I’m not sure. There’s a lot I want to do; I want to continue to produce content for MaleSubmissionArt.com, I want to keep blogging about sex and tech, I want to find people with whom I can collaborate on these interests, but I don’t really have a clear picture of what to do to make that happen.

Go to more of the various sexuality and other events, I suppose. Maybe write an open letter to Kink, Inc. and directly share my views and frustrations with them. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, I present you, dear reader, with a similar choice: you read this, and you look at me, and you will of course think whatever you will think. “That boy is bitter and jealous, negative and malicious,” for example. (I’m almost sure quite a number of people think this about me.) Even if you do think that, though, I hope you ask yourself why I am this way. How did someone who so eagerly and so passionately wants to improve the common perceptions of BDSM that he literally wears himself down to illness and poverty to do it (to be blunt, my bank balance hasn’t been this low since before I was a teenager), how did he become so put off by the things he sees in the BDSM community? And then, I hope, you will take the next step and ask yourself what you can do to change that for the people who have yet to be so tainted as I have become.

In all seriousness, I’m asking you to ask this of yourself for the children.

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Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Now I remember why I love and hate New York City’s BDSM scene

Category labels: Bitter and jealous, Community, Femdom, Male sexuality, Personal experience, Rant, Stupid dominants, Stupid submissives, Vanilla life

So, this is a complete and utter rant, because that’s just the mood I’m in. Also, it’s my blog. In case you didn’t know, I rant hard (and fast).

My first half-week in New York City has been an utter roller coaster. In these few short days after I (mostly) finished regrouping with friends, I remember exactly what I love about New York City, and exactly why I can’t stand it anymore. On Thursday, my first day back, I literally got off a bus, called Sinclair, and spent the evening first at Alphabet Soup (organized by the extremely perky and energetic Mina), and then later at a smaller, somewhat more private gathering of a few particular sex bloggers.

Let me say that again. I literally got off a bus, and went to a kinky social gathering with friends. I spent the majority of my time at Alphabet Soup talking to Sinclair about femme identity as it relates to cisgendered men. Others joined the conversation and things branched from there, but never did the conversation stop, and rarely did I say something that people couldn’t offer their own opinions on. I think I got the “you’re kind of an alien” face twice, maybe.

Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve felt like any gathering—regardless of whether it was filled with kinky people or not—was even remotely interesting on a sociosexual conversational level? That’s right, a year, because I was in fucking Sydney, where despite not being in a body-phobic culture like America is sadly entrenched in, people are still so massively ignorant about gender and sexuality issues (including people in the BDSM community), that it felt like I had actually travelled back in time. So, that was awesome.

But Alphabet Soup had its less-than-awesome moments, too. One dominant woman (plus one point) started talking to me, but her tone and demeanor was so overly presumptuous that I lost interest pretty quickly. One of the first things she said was, “I can get any man I want.” (Minus ten billion points.) ‘Really?’ I thought, ‘Well, you must not want me, then, because you’ve just ensured you’re not going to get me.’

Since I’m a submissive man, I get similar reactions when I turn down would-be advances from dominant women as I do for being a self-sufficient professional from bosses when I quit jobs: shock and a certain degree of indignation. It’s like they simply can’t parse what just happened, and the conversations would almost be funny if those conversations didn’t betray how totally fucked up these people probably treat the rest of their professional or sexual lives.

On the sexual advances front, I blame a massive swath of other submissive men for this, the ones whom I sometimes feel compelled to apologize to my friends over because they are so stereotypically stupid. No, really, on behalf of my gender, I’m sorry. (On the job front, I blame the education system for lying about life so horribly and for not giving students the actual skills they need to make it on their own.)

I was having a good time at Alphabet Soup, but was glad when Sinclair pulled me out of the bar to grab a slice of pizza and continue our conversation. Afterwards, we met up with Axe and Bad Man, among others at yet-another-bar. I had a blast getting to see Axe again, who also introduced me to Mia, and then had another awesome conversation about pornography and the impetus behind MaleSubmissionArt.com, my photo-blog-ish thing where I try my best to make poignant remarks about “bad” porn by showcasing “good” porn.

My favorite exchange from that conversation had to do with horse sex—which isn’t and probably never will be my thing—where somewhere in there I said that I’d be happy to see pornography depicting men having sex with horses because so much of that same stuff exists depicting women. Seriously, doesn’t it strike anyone else as being somewhat fucked up that it’s 2009 and I had to make a web site so that when you Google “submissive men art” or similar, you actually have a shot in hell of getting what you’ve been searching for? And no, damnit, pictures of women dominating men are not the same as pictures of men being submissive to women.

Also frustrating? The fact that “Femdom Sissy Art” is still ranked higher. Fuck’s sake. This was supposed to be the future. Where’s my goddamn equal sexual opportunity? And while you’re at it, where’s my goddamn flying car?!

Anyway, I left when the gathering whittled down to few enough people that the conversation, thanks to the skew of hegemonically masculine men, I suppose, began to go places I was no longer interested in going. Like, uhm, why girls don’t call you back when you send them text messages that read “come over.” (Should I apologize for this one on behalf of my gender? No, probably not.)

I spent the night in Brooklyn and the next day, mostly, with my family. That was good. The weekend was as relaxing as I could hope for, but I’m still stressed and need a vacation. Badly.

Then on Monday I hopped down to Conversio Virium for some pre-meeting sociability, promptly ditched the meeting itself in favor of food and conversation with Reki, and then returned for some additional post-meeting sociability.

It’s absolutely inspiring to see some of the Conversio kids be as outgoing and proud and happy as they seem to be. Their vice-president in particular is a young man who I remember as someone who was barely able to whisper when he spoke. Now, he hugs me warmly and openly.

I’m at once incredibly satisfied knowing I had a hand in making a space where he could blossom in that way, and also incredibly envious that his experiences were so quickly so positive while mine at that age were so utterly bitter. I sincerely hope he takes all of those positive experiences and works to make sure that others can also benefit so profoundly from CV.

I keep my iPod with me at all times because I’m constantly writing notes in it, ideas for blog posts or other rants, things I can do better for my community-related projects, and so forth. It’s simultaneously inspiring and depressing being back here. I’m thrilled that I’m surrounded by such wonderful stimuli again, but I’m more than a little overwhelmed at the challenge that lies ahead. Cuz, fuck, I’ve still so much work to do to make the kinds of spaces I’ve always wanted to have ahead of me.

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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?

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Sunday, December 16, 2007

Normal is anything but

Category labels: Bitter and jealous, Emotions, Fetish, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Sex, Vanilla life

What-if questions are the introvert’s Schrödinger’s cat. At once educational and unworkable, they can provide insight into your current mental state or process, whatever that may be. More interesting than simply performing the thought-experiment once is performing it several times, posing the question to yourself again after a significant amount of time has elapsed since the last time you thought about it.

The ever-prolific Richard Evans Lee has been posting questions for bloggers on his new site, FetishMeme.com and Dev picked one up that I found interesting. It reads:

If you could remove your kinky sexuality, become ‘vanilla,’ conventionally sexualized, would you? Would you rather have normal erotic needs than face the challenges and frustrations of being unlike the majority? Could being like most people be a sufficient repayment for knowing exactly what you need even though it is specialized and not easily realized? Would you rather be normal?

I commented on that post, saying something like, to me, it seems to be a matter of satisfaction. Put simply, when I am feeling satisfied with what I have, then I don’t feel like changing it because what I have is wonderful and makes me happy. However, in times of distress when I am not feeling fulfilled due to a lack of that Thing I Want, then yes, I would exchange my differences for normalcy in the hopes that such normalcy would elevate my chances of fulfillment simply thanks to the probability of that Thing I Want being more available, less stigmatized, or hopefully both.

Here’s the thing: we all want whatever it is we want. You can’t escape your own desires, no matter how “abnormal” (though I prefer to use the word atypical) they are, no matter how likely or how well you can fulfill them, how difficult that process will be specifically for you, or what other people might think of you for wanting it in the first place. You just can’t. More people than I’d like to imagine try to do just that every day, with universally similar and depressing results—failure, every time.

For many people with atypical desires, especially sexual ones, actually experiencing fulfillment is a pipe dream, and (sadly) they accept it as such. Thankfully, the human psyche is an amazingly resilient thing. These people may feel bad about themselves or their state of affairs, but they’ll ultimately be okay, and the vast majority of them will blend into the everyday populous as completely normal, fully-functional people that are (for all intents and purposes) just like you and me.

What’s even more depressing, in fact, is that personal fulfillment of any kind, not just sexual, is so often regarded as being a pipe dream that it is actually considered “normal” to long for it and not to have it. Millions of employees work endless 9–5’s in jobs they don’t like for decades (that’s longer than I’ve been alive!), most of them for less money than I used to make last year when I was 22, and that’s if they’re lucky. What is it about these people that makes them so able, no, willing, to do that? And what makes me so unable, if not unwilling, to follow suit?

I’m reminded often of an anecdote my father once told me when I was very little about elephants in the circus. He said that elephants are often kept in their tents with a single iron cuff closed around one of their ankles that is then chained to a stake driven into the ground. Soon after birth, a baby elephant will find itself with such a shackle and, being a baby (small and weak), will also find that it is unable to pull itself away from this stake or escape. As it grows older, it stops trying to escape from the shackle and before long it considers the restraint to be irremovable except by its handlers. However, as a much stronger grown elephant, it would have no problem whatsoever removing the stake from the ground and yet it never attempts to do this.

I have no idea if that anecdote about elephants in the circus is true or not, but I think that most people, who are imbued so strongly with other people’s values from birth, values that reinforce their own importance while simultaneously suppressing or dismissing questions about them, end up like the elephant in my father’s anecdote. Most people—parents, teachers, older children—thoughtlessly tell kids, “you can do anything you want” while in the same breath berating them for doing the most mundane, natural of things. “Stop crying! Sit still! Don’t play with that!”

Little wonder most people start to think of things in terms of “don’t”s and “can’t”s by the time they’ve reached elementary school. At which point, of course, it’s the same thing all over again. Then when they reach adulthood, it’s once again more of the same only this time it’s in the shiny, brand-new packaging of A Job. Most people’s single significant reprieve, if it can even be called that, is college. If you want to know why college is what most people call the time of their lives, it’s because it’s usually the only time they can remember when the hope of possibility ever permeated their environment in amounts big enough to make a difference.

If this is all sounding a little dramatic, then you’re actually getting the point: most people feel exactly that sort of overwhelming hopelessness in regards to their sexual satisfaction. Furthermore, the more “abnormal,” the more “perverse,” the more stigmatized and discriminated against your sexuality is, the more overwhelmed you are by just such a feeling of hopelessness.

I am very lucky. I have counted my blessings. I have acknowledged the good and caring people around me, though perhaps not enough. (Can anyone ever do that enough when the disparity between the “lucky” and the “unlucky” is so vast?) Despite all of that, even I feel overwhelmed too often by sadness born from a lack of fulfillment in my social and sexual life, not to mention my professional life, my education (or lack thereof—I am a middle- and high-school drop out), and my own private sense of self-worth and self-image.

So you ask me if I would rather be vanilla, rather be more like everyone else, as though being that would make me happier. Unfortunately, the question is moot: I’m not like everyone else, and as all the evidence to the contrary has made abundantly clear, simply wishing it and waiting will not make it so. But if I could change? Be something or someone I’m not?

Well, yeah, I’d turn vanilla. Sure, I’d turn into a guy who wants the straight-forward 9–5, the house, the wife, the two-point-four kids, the family pet, and could be happy with that. And even though most other people are saying they wouldn’t, that they’d never give up who they are or what they have, I bet if you asked them at the right moment, maybe tomorrow or next year, or maybe last year, I bet at one point or another, they’d say yes, too.

Yes. I’d do it. I’d be someone else.

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Wednesday, December 12, 2007

The rules of flirting are sexist and wrong

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Bisexuality, Bitter and jealous, Communication, D/s dynamics, Gender fluidity, Myths and misconceptions, Personal history, Politics of sex, Sexism

When I was a little boy, I was uncomfortable in social situations. My mother has a VHS videocassette of me in kindergarten. In it, I am sitting on one of my teachers’ lap while all the other girls and boys are sitting in a circle.

“Don’t you want to sit with the other kids?” you hear my teacher asking me.

“No!” I say simply and with quite surprising vigor. It’s a very telling clip. I remember thinking, even at that young age, that I did not like most boys and that I did not want to be like them. I knew, instinctively if not cognitively, that the way I was being socialized was not a way I found comfortable. It wasn’t an accurate representation of who I wanted to be.

By the age of ten and in elementary school, I developed an awareness of sex and had already had my first crush. Unlike most boys who had crushes and who typically made fun of the girls they liked, I never said anything to my crush. I made no initiating move. I did not pursue her.

This “passive” behavior which seemed abnormal for a boy and felt isolating to me at the time was something that I came to learn was not uncommon at all in many men. These days I often meet other men who are just as perplexed about the expectation that men should pursue their romantic interests (why is that our job?) and envious of the so-called “feminine” role that is expected to (passively) attract them. Today, I have a far greater understanding of why this seems backwards to me and (surprise!) it doesn’t have anything to do with my biological sex (male) or my sexual orientation (bisexual) or role (submissive).

Like everything else on a person’s individual sexuality spectrum, an active or a passive flirting persona (for lack of better terms) is, in reality, entirely decoupled from one’s other sexual traits. In other words, the rules of flirting we learn as youths are sexist, and wrong.

The other night I tried really hard to come up with as many different ways of flirting as possible. I thought I might be able to get ten, but in the end I came up with only seven generic activities. The activities I came up with are as follows:

  1. Compliment someone on something specific such as one’s jewelry or choice of attire.
  2. Move into personal space with a touch, gesture, or other motion, such as by offering a massage or initiating snuggling.
  3. Buy an ephemeral or otherwise insignificant gift such as flowers or a card.
  4. Capitalize on a subtle opportunity to communicate positively such as remembering a birthday or other personally important date or time mark.
  5. Present oneself with particularly physically alluring traits such as specific, perhaps revealing, styles of dress.
  6. Behave in ways observed to produce positive feelings such as noticing personal specifics (often that others have not) such as what one’s likes and dislikes are.
  7. Offer to perform some useful task, such as fixing a broken object (shelf, computer error (I’m really good at that fixing computer error thing)).

There are probably more, but I couldn’t think of them. Every item on this list except the fifth one (“Present oneself with particularly physically alluring traits”) is active, that is, it is an example of pursuit and not of attraction. As someone with a penis, it makes sense that these would be the things I think about when I think of flirting because those are the ones I was taught. It also explains why I am such a flirting retard because I strongly prefer to do the fifth one—which has a lot to do with why I enjoy being someone known for “playing heavily.”

I don’t want to pursue. It’s not because I’m lazy or because I’m unwilling to find partners. It’s because pursuing feels wrong, it’s not fun, it’s not how I want to flirt. Pursuing feels like fucking, it feels stereotypically male, saddled with stereotypically male expectations, expectations that I’m not willing to accept in a sexual relationship because carrying them out doesn’t satisfy me sexually. Pursuing feels like fucking, and attracting feels like getting fucked. When I have sex, I want to get fucked.

This is, unfortunately, a major problem for me when it comes to the realm of Meeting Other People. Put simply, I don’t feel comfortable being the stereotypical pursuer and no one (or too few people) out there feel comfortable pursuing men, because it doesn’t matter if a man is dominant or submissive; every man is the pursuer and every woman is pursued. This is a lose-lose situation for me because it means that to get people to become play partners I have to do the pursuing (lose) or else I don’t get play partners (lose).

Another noteworthy point to be made is that, at the moment, I am just as uncomfortable being the object of pursuit as the pursuer, in large part because I have no idea what to do in that situation, and that is equally frustrating. I was never socially taught that part of the game and unfortunately observation alone does not an effective teacher make. I sometimes don’t even notice that I’m being flirted with until after the fact, though I’m getting better with that first step—I can remember one notable example in a gay bar when I was bought a drink. As Rona says more eloquently than I could, much of this probably stems from Marxist-like issues; the clearly emotionally-damaged sentiment that the only possible reason I might be flirted with in the first place is to become the butt of a joke.

Anyway, this seems reminiscent if not identical to the situation that many submissive men find themselves in, if I could generalize a little bit. Put yet another way, it reminds me of the paradoxical conversation of every force or objectification fantasy negotiation. The least objectifying thing in the world you could possibly do is to ask to be objectified. Likewise, the least passively attracting thing you could do is actively pursue a potential partner.

Why does it have to be that way?

Eileen had a clever suggestion when I was talking with her about this the other night. She suggested I go look at books that try to teach women how to flirt and meet men. The logic here is that if I want to learn more about how to flirt and every single book on the subject for men is full of sexist advice for what it sees as the typical man, then I should find books for women full of sexist advice for what it sees as the typical woman far more appealing. There is still the challenge of balancing the fact that I am not a woman on top of the sexist advice, but having looked into the alternative, I am willing to give this a shot. (Does anyone have any good “flirting 101″ book recommendations?)

Of course, the problem with all this is the same as it’s always been: there are no good sexual role models for the kind of person I want to be. No famous “beta male” sex icon to use the insulting, hierarchical terminology. I guess I’ll just have to keep making this shit up as I go along.

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Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Men and masks in porn

Category labels: Bitter and jealous, Erotica and pornography, Kink events, Rant, Sexism

Here are some preliminary thoughts about something I see pretty often in pornography, especially BDSM (or kink-wanna-be) porn, that I don’t like. Men in such pornography, regardless of whether they are dominant or submissive, gay or straight (as if men’s sexuality is as binary as that), or most any other characteristic that I can think of, are often seen wearing masks, hoods, or other items intended to hide their identity and render them, mostly, anonymous. This is very frustrating for several reasons.

  • It is an obviously gendered inequality; that is to say it is downright sexist. Women, again regardless of their sexual orientation, role, or other characteristics, are never seen wearing such anonymizing devices unless the purpose of the pornography is to accentuate (presumably) consensual objectification (which I have no problem with and think is very sexy).
  • It tells men that our sexuality is expendable and replaceable. This is probably a bigger issue than I can do justice (due to a lack of education on the subject), but this is also showcased quite profoundly by the fact that men are universally paid less for their participation in pornography—if they are paid at all—than women are.
  • It tells men that we are unsightly. I’ve even seen gay porn in which the only actors are men who are all wearing masks. I mean, really, what the fuck? Do these pornographers think that gay people do not like seeing the faces of their sexual partners?
  • It makes ignorant or uninformed people believe that participating in sexual acts such as the ones portrayed is something to be ashamed of, so much so that even the actors fear for their identity.
  • It makes for worse porn.

First of all, I am not talking about the kind of sex that happily incorporates hoods and masks into the sexual act. I am instead talking about the kind of porn that uses hoods and masks specifically for purposes so obviously not related to the sex I’m watching that their mere presence becomes distracting in the best case and downright insulting in the worse. Frankly, I am insulted by the insinuation that the only valid part of a man’s body worthy of being filmed is his penis. It’s simply untrue and unfair.

It is absurd to watch Men in Pain clips in which the naked guy is being interviewed about his experience while he is wearing nothing but a locking leather hood. It is similarly absurd to see clips or pictures of bound women being fingered by men who walk in and out of the frame, fully clothed and masked, in an obvious attempt to be as stealthy as possible.

The standard disclaimer from the pornographers is this: most people who buy our porn are men, so we want to make it as easy as possible for men to feel like they can imagine themselves as the man in the video/picture/whatever. First of all, completely sidestepping the circular point that most porn is made for men and that’s obviously why most of the pornographer’s customers are men (it really isn’t rocket science), they need to understand that as a submissive guy, which is indeed part of their claimed target audience, the person I see myself replacing is the submissive. If the submissive is faceless because he is hidden by a hood when he shouldn’t be, then I lose a big chunk of information about how that submissive is feeling and thus the porn becomes less valuable to me.

In other words, I would prefer to wank to pictures of men being tortured than pictures of women torturing men. This is why I tend to enjoy femsub porn more than most malesub porn out there. At least in those instances I can actually get the emotional content from the submissive’s point of view and vicariously feel that. Porn that hides the submissive man behind a hood is taking the hottest part of the picture, the bottom, out of focus.

In every instance of viewing the hooded or masked man the message is the same: the man is just “some guy.” He could have been replaced by anybody, and the effect would be identical. All the value to the product is brought by the women. And in gay porn where everyone’s wearing masks? Again, what are they thinking the value is in that if it’s not some sort of plot device?

There is a paradox here. The women are at once more valuable and less protected than the men. Think about it. Why else would someone want to hide their identity while doing porn? Duh, it’s not okay to do porn. Doing it is wrong, something to ashamed of, something you need to hide for fear of being outed, as sex worker, a pervert, or maybe something even worse. Yet only the men are hiding. Does the fact that they are mean they are so much more fragile than the women? Please.

What is most personally disturbing to me is the instance when submissive men are involved in some porn scene and yet the porn scene is so obviously not about submissive men that one would think submissive men was not actually a sexuality.

The most striking recent example of this occurred the other weekend at Black Rose XX, where in the Oasis Room a table full of fetish photography postcards was laid out. Out of the more than 20 available photographs, a grand total of 2 showed submissive men at all. One image showed a woman looking over her shoulder (dressed in formal fetish fatigues, you know the kind) and in the background, literally about 2 centimeters high, was a small image of a submissive man—hooded, of course—doing absolutely nothing interesting. The second postcard was a close-up picture of a torso in a waist-cincher, extremely shapely and made-up, whose only hint of maleness was the few pixels of clear testicle peeking out between the legs.

The experience of seeing those postcards was saved a little when Eileen and I overheard two women looking at them muttering to themselves, “It’s all female submissives.”

“Didn’t you know?” Eileen sarcastically jabbed at them, “Men aren’t pretty enough to photograph.”

This sent one of the women on a very welcomed, short rant about that fact, paraphrased below.

[The photographer] told me he doesn’t photograph men because those pictures wouldn’t sell. Hah! I laughed at him, and told him I’d have bought pictures of men and how could he possibly think there wasn’t a market for such work? Just look around us! Most of the women here have come to this event with their men, dominant or otherwise. I mean, one picture, he can’t do one picture where maleness is the focus?

Of course, people know that women aren’t “the real market” for images of men, because only other men are, right? This woman clearly didn’t seem to think so. Neither does this more famous one.

More to the point, though I hate to admit at times because it lets people too easily lump me into that category of men-who-would-buy-porn-of-men, I would like to see porn of submissive men where submissive men are actually the focus of the porn because then I could actually believe that I’m not the only man in the world who wants to do those sorts of things. Why else do you think people look at porn? It’s because they are using it as an instructive example of figuring out their sexual likes and dislikes. I look at porn to go, “Holy fuck, that looks awesome, I want to have the things that that girl is having done to her done to me!”

I’ve gotten really good pretending all the tied up women in porn are really tied up men, but it still angers me that I have to do it. It is endlessly frustrating to see an endless stream of so much very good pornography, excellent bondage, extremely hot fantasies-come-true only for the women who bottom. There is precious little good male bondage, and even then, there’s no sex. This is why so much of my personal porn collection that has anything to do with men getting fucked is drawn art.

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Wednesday, December 5, 2007

On Friends and Enemies

Category labels: BDSM safety, Bitter and jealous, Community, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Kink events, Personal experience, Stupid dominants

Early Monday morning before dawn, back at home from Black Rose and in Eileen’s arms, I was crying because I felt lonely and invisible. Moments before, out of bitterness and jealousy, I had just said that the people I like were not my friends in scene (kink) spaces. A little while later, I told Eileen parts of the following story. When I was done, she sighed at me and said, “You say these people aren’t your friends, yet you defend them viciously.” This is that story.

I think I met Rona, a relatively young, beautiful, and obviously intelligent woman, the first night in the Black Rose dungeon. It could have been the second night, and it could have been in one of the relaxation areas known as the Oasis Room. I can’t remember exactly because just about the first thing I did on that Friday evening was stand against an X-frame and present my back as the target for singletails and fists.

In any event, sooner or later one evening during the weekend Rona, another new friend, and I were sitting in the Oasis Room talking about some inconsequential thing. Eileen’s new fire-engine red double-locking handcuffs were locked around one of my wrists. With my hand, I fiddled with the open cuff making loud ratcheting noises in the room.

Out of nowhere, a man who shall remain nameless approached our little circle, smiling, and said, “If you’re going to make some noise, do it with some real cuffs!” He handed me a set of heavy metal handcuffs that dwarfed the standard police-issue pair of handcuffs I was playing with.

Immediately, instinctually, I knew I would not like this man. His announcement was clearly not intended for me but for Rona, whom he turned to with a lascivious smile after depositing the enormous set of cuffs in my palms. Pissing contest, I thought to myself. It is thought typical of older men who aren’t kinky to buy sports cars to show off the size of their penis. Perhaps older men who are kinky buy large handcuffs for the same reason.

In an attempt not to be overtly rude I said, “Wow, these are huge.” They also don’t sound any different than mine, I also observed, though I did not say that part out loud.

“Yeah, and they come in different sizes, too,” he said, taking the first pair out of my hands and replacing them with a slightly smaller version.

“Where did you get them, and how much were they?” Why waste my time asking questions one by one when asking related questions in groups might make him more likely to say only those things I cared about hearing? I had to admit, the cuffs were pretty. If I disliked this man’s presence, perhaps I could find some solace in his cool toys at least for a few moments.

Germany, not too expensive, they’ll make ‘em custom for you, they’re special because they don’t pull, and he’s got so many because he’s been collecting them for some forty-odd years, I learned. A brief conversation about his toybag developed, during which he called over his slave to bring this or that or the other thing.

By this time, the man was lounging on his side next to us and grabbed every opportunity he could to talk about himself, belaboring points like his experience (some forty-odd years), name-dropping every connection he had, and doing this all while looking at Rona and decidedly not at me or our other (male) friend. The two of us might as well have been invisible, since he seemed to turn towards us with a little start whenever we would say anything in response to him.

“I make her sleep in those cuffs,” he gestured towards his slave while he rambled on and on. “Yeah, they’re comfortable enough, but why should I care? I’m not wearing them.” Oh yeah, I thought to myself, you’re so bad-ass, you definitely have a bigger penis than me. I’m kind of amazed you haven’t creamed your pants fantasizing about yourself already.

This is exactly the kind of thing that would happen to me every Friday and Saturday night in Paddles, New York City’s only public BDSM club, almost all night, for two years straight. (Why I poured money into Paddles’s coffers twice a week for two years straight is another story entirely.) By now I’ve become quite accustomed to that sort of interaction from these kinds of “mandoms” (to steal a term from Bitchy).

These days I take a little more glee in steering the conversations towards topics that I know these men would find uncomfortable, or that might prove amusing at least in some small way. One such highlight I can remember is the following:

Me: I used to live in Manhattan in a 250-square-foot apartment that I shared.
Him: Shared? With someone of the opposite sex, I hope, so it’d be nice to get close!
Me: Well, I’m bisexual, so I’m not particularly concerned with a roommate’s sex.
Him: Oh! Well…I always said bisexual people are the luckiest. My friend, she’s a bisexual switch. She’s got the whole world to play with because bisexuals are all basically sluts!

(I’ll admit to paraphrasing that, but I guarantee you that it sounded even better in person.)

Rona seemed decidedly uninterested in this fellow and had become much less talkative since this man encroached upon our space. His slave, for her part, chimed in frequently with verifications of her master’s claims (“I often cook dinner in those cuffs!”) at what seemed like expertly rehearsed opportune moments.

Back to the cuffs, however, he reiterated their comfort and then asked Rona if he could borrow her wrist. I tensed at this, but a moment later she agreed and allowed her wrist to be cuffed. Up until now this man was a nuisance, obviously hitting on Rona but in no position to be a threat. Of course, we were surrounded by other friends having their own conversations and we were in an environment where safety was on everyone’s mind, even going so far as to have designated volunteers serving as Dungeon Monitors perusing the nearby areas. Nevertheless, there was a line that I felt he had crossed.

Now, I started watching this man’s shoulders and face closely. I watched his shoulders because their movement would be the first sign that he would move his arm, and I watched his face because his eyes would tell me where his attention would focus next and his mouth would tell me a lot about how he was feeling about the thing he was focusing his attention on. If he was going to have my new friend’s wrists cuffed, then I wanted to make sure, as the person physically closest to my new friend, that I could serve as a first line of defense. If this was combat, then this man was an enemy.

Of course, Rona clearly needed no defense in this particular situation, and yet, I was already bracing myself to go all commando on this guy’s ass—that is, assert Rona’s requests, whatever it be, vocally or physically if necessary—the moment a signal from Rona indicated I should do so. Eventually Rona cited exhaustion as an excuse to get him to remove the cuffs. When he started tickling her instead, she quickly became rightfully insistent and he did finally leave us, taking his German cuffs with him. Rona was—and is—fine.

The experience, however, put me in a sour mood. I had been reminded of dozens upon dozens of similar, negative experiences. None that ended any worse than what I just described but negative nonetheless. I was reminded of a few stories my ex-girlfriend had told me, some stories long-distance online friends had told me, and dozens of stories I’d heard elsewhere as well, some of which had ended in worse ways than this one. Most of all, I felt angry.

I was angry about everything that had just happened. The invisibility; the assumption that we—or she—was too stupid to see what this simpleton’s desires were; the roundabout way he felt he had to go about chatting Rona up; the pissing contest he wanted to start—consciously or otherwise—with me. It was all so unnecessary, I think, and so damaging. Maybe not if it were just once, or twice, but after two times a week for two years straight it starts to add up. I’m living, livid proof.

Epilogue: Interested persons might find this post by Rona an interesting followup.

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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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Tuesday, August 21, 2007

I want to be a pretty boy

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Bitter and jealous, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Femdom, Feminization and cross-dressing, Fetish, Myths and misconceptions, Personal history

I’ve never been a manly man. When I was younger, I watched quite a bit of television. I remember lots of the imagery I was presented with quite vividly. In almost every case, I wanted to be the girls. Growing up, I quickly learned that wanting to be more like the girls was a desire frowned upon by pretty much everybody else—not least of all, by the girls.

These days, the same things still come up in daily conversation as they did in years past. “I wish I could lose ten more pounds—I don’t feel pretty,” I hear women say all the time. In response, everyone simultaneously begins talking about the oppressive nature of our culture’s media campaigns. “Oh, come on. You don’t have to look like every model in the magazines. You’re smart, you’re kind; of course you’re hot,” they’ll say to her in an effort to comfort and sympathize.

Most of the time, I think women’s self-image issues are physically, though not emotionally, unfounded. All but one of my girlfriends were, to use the obvious example, heavier than the BMI charts would have them feel comfortable about. My femdom fantasies have always been tilted toward larger girls. Hula dancers were an ironic motif, but I attribute this mostly to the healthier, more attractive weight Hawaiian girls tend to carry. I’ll never understand the fetish for stick-figure girls. That can be sexy but I think women are sexier if they’re shapely.

Issues men may have with their body image, however, are almost never even recognized. If they are, they discuss how unmanly boys feel and offer ways to feel more manly. Nothing we see in our culture tells boys that it’s okay to want to feel pretty, to want to be treated in ways similar to the way we see people treating girls. If a boy, like me, wanted that, they call him a sissy and expect him to want to feel bad about it. I find this fact, an association often cited between cross-dressing and humiliation, nothing less than repulsive.

Furthermore, every time I’ve ever hinted at having body image issues of any kind at all, a very strange thing happens. Rather than address these issues, people turn to my girlfriend and give her a once-over. Then, they turn back to me. “How can you think of yourself as not attractive?” They ask, puzzled. “Your girlfriend is so hot.”

Granted, my girlfriend is hot. But what, pray tell, does that have to do with my own self-image? You’ve just told me that my own self-image should be measured by how hot my girlfriend is. Call me crazy, but my girlfriend’s attractiveness should not be the scale by which I measure my own.

Is that what you’d say to a fat girl, by the way? Oh, you’re totally sexy because your boyfriend is super skinny. What kind of logic is that? It’s not only completely missing the point, it doesn’t make her feel better. In fact, it often makes her feel worse. And that’s exactly what doing that does to me: it makes me feel worse.

Why is it a taboo to discuss men on the basis of their looks? Even in romance novels, where the gallant and obligatorily handsome man plays center stage, most descriptions about his looks center on his other attributes. His strong muscles. His virile penis. His healthy hair. It’s not about the way he looks, it’s about what he can offer in every other realm; wealth, health, or power. Even here, men’s sexual attractiveness is being judged on everything except their looks. This is crazy.

To top it off, even the pretty men, who were called the derogatory term “twinks” in gay slang for quite a while, are usually portrayed in as decidedly not delicate a manner as possible; sweating profusely, working out, doing some manly chore, or otherwise being rough and tumble. The message? Be ruggedly handsome, sure, but don’t be pretty.

By this culture’s dogma, being pretty is a woman’s job. Women are the ones who are “supposed to” do the attracting; men are supposed to be attracted. But this is insulting, and unfair. Wanting to feel pretty often goes hand-in-hand with wanting to be pursued. The emotions are the same: love me, I’m precious. But being pursued is the woman’s job, as if they are the only ones allowed to feel as though they are precious and worthy of loving attentions.

This whole fucked-up mess does a lot of things for men. It makes us get paid more at work. It makes it easier for us to attract people into old age (where, I’m sorry, looks are just not going to follow). It makes it harder to objectify us in ways we don’t want. And, unfortunately, it makes it a lot harder for us to talk about body image issues—especially if you’re like me and you don’t even want to have the traditional Vin-Diesel-the-body-builder look and instead want to look like the lithe, nubile, pretty young things you only see cast in the gender role of supreme femininity.

Well, I have a confession to make. I like dressing up as a girl because, in part, it makes me feel pretty. It does this because putting on frilly panties is the only time I feel the culture in which I live is telling me that I might actually get away with being pretty.

This confession, low and behold, is not uncommon. Men who want to feel pretty end up wanting to emulate women because we have no other choice. Why can men, secure in their masculinity, not also be pretty? Even the dictionary is stupendously unhelpful here. Defining “pretty” results in this definition from Princeton’s web dictionary:

pleasing by delicacy or grace; not imposing; “pretty girl”; “pretty song”; “pretty room”

(Emphasis added by yours truly.)

I have been called graceful. I have also been called delicate. I’ve been called pleasing a bunch more times than these other two things combined.

People I don’t know ask me if I dye my hair when they look at its color in the sun (I don’t). They ask me if I’ve ever played the piano when they notice the way my fingers curl around cups as I drink (I haven’t). They have remarked on how carefully I treat all my belongings, and how thoughtful I am when I am hosting a guest. But they have never called me pretty.

It may surprise some of you to hear this, but Eileen is actually the first person I have known that has called me pretty. She is fond of my ass and these days I might call it one of the prettiest parts of me, but it was not always this way.

One night many years ago, well before I even consciously thought about why I kept wanting to feel pretty, I was lounging with my then-girlfriend in the bedroom I shared with my brother. I remember only a single sentence from the conversation we had that night. It was this sentence that my girlfriend said to me that cued six years of body image issues centered around my butt: “I would like it if your ass was firmer.”

What did firmer mean, anyway? It meant that I should have more of a boy’s body. I didn’t have a muscular gluteus maximus; I didn’t have the body of a strong, rugged, self-respecting man. But you know what, I didn’t want that body, either. And that should’ve been okay.


Addendum: For those interested in a bit more academic self-education (the best kind, if you ask me), I would highly suggest reading the Wikipedia articles on sissyphobia and effeminacy, for a start.

A particular passage of interest is cited below, and serves as a wonderful example of the fact that cultural ideals change with time. My message in this post, if you are to take one from it that I did not actually intend when I started, would be to stay aware of this constantly changing cultural stereotype—in all cultures and in all situations—and to avoid letting cultural noncompliance result in prejudiced or oppressive actions of any kind.

Pre-Stonewall “closet” culture accepted homosexuality as effeminate behaviour, and thus emphasized camp, drag, and swish including an interest in fashion (Henry, 1955; West, 1977) and decorating (Fischer 1972; White 1980; Henry 1955, 304). Masculine gay men did exist but were marginalised (Warren 1972, 1974; Helmer 1963) and formed their own communities, such as leather and Western (Goldstein, 1975), and/or donned working class outfits (Fischer, 1972) such as sailor uniforms (Cory and LeRoy, 1963). (Levine, 1998, p.21-23, 56)

Post-Stonewall, “clone culture” became dominant and effeminacy is now marginalised. One indicator of this is a definite preference shown in personal ads for masculine-behaving men (Bailey et al 1997).

My personal experiences written above are likely the result of my interaction with New York City’s leather subculture, as that community is my primary social outlet (for now).

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Tuesday, August 14, 2007

More men need to cry on the big porn screen

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM psychology, Bitter and jealous, Community, D/s dynamics, Erotica and pornography, Exhibitionism, Femdom, Politics of sex, Professional BDSM, Rant, Sex, Stupid submissives

The other day during dinner while hanging out with friends, of course, pornography gets brought up. (I’m sure the waitresses love us. Or hate us. Or love to hate us. (That’s called foreshadowing, by the way. (And this is called Lisp.)))

Now, porn gets brought up all the time in conversations with my general social circle. This might be because some of them are sex workers, others are sex bloggers, and still others are BDSM equipment vendors, the latter of whom don’t blog much. But unlike the usual discussion, this time I observed a much more interesting exchange about porn. I thought I’d share it with you.

The professor (who has made guest appearances elsewhere) started talking about this one porn web site in particular that’s selling a very humiliation-specific brand of hardcore sex. It’s all about degrading women while fucking them. It’s unfortunate that I’ll never be able to do his description justice because smiles that wide just can’t be communicated through words.

Suffice it to say, however, that all the women start out with delicately applied make up and by the end of the video the tears spilling from their eyes have turned their faces tie-dye colored, their throats are horse as they shout through ragged gasps about how dirty they are, and the guys are demanding they open up and get ready for another dick.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the bigger the shock value, the bigger the payday. (Lack of link because, come on. Tons of porn sites do this, not just this one. Do you really need a link?)

To my knowledge, I don’t think this has anything explicitly related to so-called formal BDSM (you know, whips and chains and stuff, the “serious” stuff) but come on, you can’t deny that’s fucking kinky sex.

Now, here’s the interesting part that came from the conversation. After the table was left momentarily silenced from the description of such (hopefully consensual and totally hot) humiliating sexual abuse, Eileen said, See, I’d have no problem with any of that at all if there were sites where I could see women doing that to men.

“Well, there’s like, Men In Pain—”, our professor friend started to say.

“Ohhhh no,” Eileen and I both started simultaneously. “Men In Pain is largely about excruciatingly typical pro-domme talk. Oh, and handjobs. Lots, and lots of handjobs.”

Are we wrong? Is there porn out there that objectifies men in an equivalent fashion to the way the industry of objectification of women (and very much including dominant women, by the way) called mainstream pornography is doing? I’ll admit to not actually having a subscription to Men In Pain. (I’ve never paid for porn in my life, unless you count buying Eileen dinner and hoping she’ll tie me to a spreader bar and stuff large things in my butt and then beat on me for it but I don’t think that’s comparable.) However, the massive amount of free video clips (soo NSFW) that Kink, Inc. puts out does not inspire hope.

So, fuck, where’s that porn video, the ones where the guys are sobbing? I’d be in it. Over the years, friends and acquaintances have offered me varying spots in varying kinds of porn shoots, but I always decline because they expect me to respond as though being asked to be in a porn production where I don’t get paid for my time is some kind of favor they’re bestowing upon me. As if, oh my god, now they like me, they really, truly like me!

What the fuck is up with that, also, by the way? First of all, it actually is a lot less sexy for me if I don’t get paid to do it, and second of all, why are my only two options for porn shoots always “stand right here and let me kick you in the balls while I look pretty” or “you’ll be blindfolded and he’ll go down on you ’til you pop”? If there’s one thing Men In Pain actually gets right (maybe there’s more than just one thing, but anyway) it’s their fucking variety. Or variety of fucking. (I even submitted a modeling application to them, for many reasons, but to no avail.) Anyway, you get my point.

I’m sure this post is going to confuse a lot of people. Maymay, they’ll say, how the fuck can you be so pro-porn and so anti-prodomme. Pro-dommes are just sex workers after all, you know. They’re part of the same industry. Why not get all huff-and-puff-and-blow-your-house-down about that porn site that your friend was talking about that you think objectifies women?

Because my problem with all of this isn’t the existence of the sex industry; it’s the monopoly (and the resulting monotony) of the sex industry that I think causes problems. In other words, it’s not just that I have a problem with pro-domme’s being the representation of female domination out in the world (a la Mistress Asscrusher), I also have problems with all the other shame-ridden stereotypes of every other gender and orientation combination. A lack of visible variety breeds a closeted, guilt-ridden culture. That is not okay.

Like Eileen said, where are the porn sites showing me some other kind of sex?

There was a wonderfully timely string of comments that started with britspin made on Bitchy’s blog earlier today just as I was trying to come up with the genius conclusion to this post. It’s so perfect, in fact, that I’m just going to quote some of what he says:

OK. Confession time. I’m one of those guys who enables this crap.

[…]

When it comes to a woman who even hints that she might be dominant, I go completely doolally. Self respect gets checked at the door, along with judgement, the awareness of possible mental health issues and anything that comes between me and the possibility of a woman doing rude, rude things.

This is even worse with people like me whose starting point with Femdom is the internet and our own fantasies- I get to measure my behaviour by strange chatroom etiquette, incredibly varied demands in alt.com profiles and a few videos made by english mansion and men in pain.

I suspect that basing my flirtation with dominant women on these reference points is not a recipe for successful social intereaction… but christ, I’m an ignoramous mostly hoping not to make an utter fool of myself… so I plead ignorance, not malignity!

Just as I’ve said countless times before. And then, just to drive the point home:

When you realise you’re sub or Dom, what reference points do you get? For me it was the avengers and a very weird fantasy about being kidnapped and kept in an emptied swimming pool by about twenty avenger clad women. I don’t think I ever got any options showing dominant women without PVC and leather.

[…]

I think with me it was very much… Gosh, I really want this badwrongthing done to me. Hmmm who seems to get away with doing badwrongthings. evil, pvc clad, fur wearing, faun torturing, whip wielding bond villanesses. Well in that casen that’s who I fancy… because they do the badwrongthings….

Did it really need this much elaboration? Where do you start railing against this stuff? Mainstream pornographers? Pro-dommes? Submissive men? Gender supremacists? Fucking abstinence-only sex educators? I’ll tell you where: every-fucking-where you see it. Yeah, that’s where you start.

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