I was reminded of this when I showed up as a volunteer for Mark’s Dungeon Crew, part of the group who had offered to help set up the Portland Leather Alliance’s post-Thanksgiving Play Party at the TA Events Center. I’d volunteered in exchange for free entry to the $20 per person party that evening, but when I got to the Events Center and stood at its doors as the big U-Haul with all the bondage furniture backed up towards us, I was overcome with an active disinclination to help.

This wasn’t laziness or freeloading; I didn’t just not want to help, I actively wanted to not help. The feeling came over me in a wave and I was briefly confused. I stood at the doorway to the party space, silent, motionless, with my hands in my pockets.

“Do you want to not help because you’re not sure if you’ll have a good time at the party?” Mish, who I’d convinced to come with me and with whom I was ostensibly volunteering for free entry, asked me after I found some awkward words for my feelings.

“No….” I said it softly, and slowly, thinking. My mouth had trouble forming the word. I felt less like I was answering her question and more like I was trying the answer on for size. “No,” I said again after a moment, more self-assured this time, for now I knew why that was not the answer.

“This needs two people,” the man unloading the U-Haul called out. He pushed a padded bondage chair toward the edge of the truck. Several volunteers appeared near him. They lifted the chair a few inches off the ground and began moving it towards the party space.

The chair was facing me head-on. I stared back at it, and that’s when I saw her. She was naked, and ugly. Her flesh was molting like a sick bird’s feathers and her bony face and hollow cheeks made her whole head resemble a skull. Her eyes were large and what thin layer of skin was stretched across her jaw curled into a mean smile. Her legs and arms were bound to the heavy wooden frame of the chair the volunteers were carrying and as they moved it into the play space the ghost turned her head, locking her eyes on mine.

Your skin makes me cry.
You float like a feather
in a beautiful world.
I wish I was special.
You’re so fucking special.

But I’m a creep,
I’m a weirdo.
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here.

“No way I’m helping,” I said aloud to myself. I turned my back and walked to the street corner without ever saying goodbye to anyone on the PLA dungeon crew.

Most submissive men hate themselves. That makes it easy for us to hate other people. That also makes it easy for other people to hate us. The BDSM Scene wouldn’t have it any other way; The Scene-State’s corrupt plutocrats have too much riding on it.

I hated myself for a long time because I want to be sexually submissive and yet I was unable to access a relationship that felt good to me. I didn’t hate myself because I wanted to be sexually submissive, I hated myself because I felt incapable of being attractive and I felt incapable of being attractive because I wanted to be sexually submissive; no one wants a submissive man.

The hatred didn’t start that way. It started as hope. I used to keep a coil of rope beneath my pillow, and I would wrap it around my wrists to comfort myself at night. I hoped that one day someone who loved me would sleep next to me, our naked skin keeping one another warm, the weight of their arms on the sides of my exposed chest as my own arms were kept above my head by the ropes.

When I first joined the BDSM Scene in 2002, I naïvely believed people there gave a shit about me. By the time my then-partner, Cookie, had burned through two relationships, I was still coiling rope under my pillow hoping I could be sexy like she was. I saw Cookie on a trailer for Kink, Inc.’s Wired Pussy porn site before I ever really played.

That’s when the hope dissipated, never to return. In that moment of invasive surprise at unexpectedly seeing my ex-partner show up on my screen as I browsed for porn, all the hope I had mutated into confusion: Why doesn’t anyone want to play with me the way I really want? Why am I not attractive? What am I doing wrong? What’s wrong with me?

Years pass.

It was getting late, but neither Eileen nor I were tired. We cast about the group, conducting an informal poll of who wanted to continue bar-hopping. The Professor was up for more, and so was C, so we said goodbye to the others as the four of us headed to the bars near St. Mark’s Place in New York City. It was an area where The Professor said he knew where to find the cheap drinks.

The Professor was a (straight) dominant man who, despite his age and ingrained ignorances, was far cooler than most of us young BDSM’ers who hung out at Conversio Virium in 2007. C was a college student, and a sex worker—a self-identified switch, a fetish model who semi-regularly bottomed for various Kink, Inc. sites, and a pro-domme. Eileen—my live-in partner, love of my life—was a dominant woman. And, well, you all know I’m a submissive man.

The four of us drank, talked, and eventually headed home to mine and Eileen’s apartment. The conversation had become flirty at the last few bars, implicitly sexual on the ride home, and explicitly so back at the apartment. I fetched us all more to drink. I remember returning to find C making out with Eileen. It wasn’t much longer before C’s clothes were on the floor. Eileen held C’s hands behind her back as they kissed, The Professor fondled C’s thighs and legs and cunt, and I stood back, smiling awkwardly and feeling very out of place in my own bedroom.

“Do you want to put an ice cube in her pussy?” The Professor asked me, taking one out of his drink and handing it to me.

I thought maybe he was being generous, trying to include me in the play scene that had “just happened.” It wasn’t just a question, it was an invitation. But it was an invitation to top. I knew how to say “no, I don’t want to put an ice cube in her pussy,” but I didn’t know how to say, “I’d rather you tie me up and put the ice cube in my ass.”

So I said nothing and slipped the ice cube I’d been handed past C’s vulva anyway. I hoped I’d feel some kind of erotic charge, but as C reacted to the cold with lustful gyrations and her perfect, practiced, pornonormative moan, I just felt worse. It was as though I was now out of place in my own skin, not just my own bedroom. The wrongness of what was happening right in front of my eyes, the stereotype that the love of my life was embracing, the offensive cliché I had so casually let enter my home, and then my bedroom, and then my bed, had now snuck its way into me. I was no longer an observer; I was a participant in something I actively wanted no part of.

The play intensified. They moved to the living room so C could feel the single-tail whip. My whip. The one that had been gifted to me for my birthday the prior year. There were no good places to throw it in our apartment so The Professor held C against his body, tits facing Eileen, near the middle of the room. Eileen ranged herself to the four-and-a-half-foot single tail. I watched it all, paralyzed, literally voiceless, like it was a train wreck in slow motion.

Bright red stripes appeared on C’s breasts and torso as Eileen singletailed her. C twisted in The Professor’s grip, lifting her legs. “Stay still,” the co-tops said several times, before finally concurring, “We need to hold her ankles in place.”

That’s when I did the most shameful thing: I prostrated myself on the floor, face down on the wood, laying myself between Eileen and C, under the range of the single-tail whip. I held onto C’s ankles with my fists and kept them in place. Eileen began to throw the whip again. Every time she did, I heard C yelp.

Sometimes, when Eileen threw a vertical strike, the follow through would land weakly across my back. It was nothing like actually being hit with the thing, nothing of consequence. But I remember wishing for it to continue, pining for just one thing: more—play with me more. There I was, a ridiculous fool, splaying myself out on the floor, doing my best imitation of bondage furniture, and feeling all but grateful for accidental swishes of single tail strikes. Strikes that weren’t even meant for me!

She wasn’t even aiming for me.

I felt so stupid. I felt so used. I felt so bad. I just wanted so much to be played with the way they were playing with C. In the moment when what I had seen in so much porn on my computer was actually happening in my own home, I was “counting my blessings,” hungrily lapping up whatever regurgitated bits of eroticism fell from the feast above me like the forgotten creep I’d become, when I should have at least said, “No way I’m helping,” turned my back, and walked away.

Later, Eileen would praise me as being “so good and helpful” during the scene, and a painful pang would explode in the middle of my chest, the emotional puncture wound in my heart draining it of blood. It would be all I could do to feign another smile.

When you were here before,
Couldn’t look you in the eye.
You’re just like an angel.

[…]

I don’t care if it hurts.
I want to have control.
I want a perfect body.
I want a perfect soul.
I want you to notice when I’m not around.
You’re so fucking special.
I wish I was special.

[…]

Whatever makes you happy.
Whatever you want.
You’re so fucking special.
I wish I was special.

But I’m a creep,
I’m a weirdo.
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here.
I don’t belong here….

—“Creep“

I had failed by not speaking up. I hated that I participated, and then I started hating myself for participating. And then I hated Eileen, C, and The Professor for being so ignorant of the societal pressure that had built up against the thing I wanted; for not knowing how long I’d kept a rope coiled under my pillow; for making me sacrifice my wants for their orgasms—again.

My hate became righteous anger. A few days later, I wrote this:

A lot of things are wrong and were never right; these things have hurt me from the first moment I interacted even remotely sexually with another person, but they are especially painful right now because of a few personal experiences that I’d much rather not go into on such a public forum. I mention that now to tell you, dearest reader, that these things are not solely the belligerent words of an angsty youth. These things do happen. They happen all the time.

[…]

I wanted to write about how submissive men will pretty much always, without fail, lose a race for sexual satisfaction out of any gender/sex/orientation combination you can come up with. Always. I’ve had a sex life that any submissive man you point at would kill to have, yet stick me in a room with other orientations and I’m still the first one sidelined, the last one standing by the fruit punch and chips, so to speak. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before, and it’s certainly going to happen again.

[…]

I’m way too angry […] to make any kind of coherent sense. So like I said, move along, keep channel surfing. There’s nothing to see here that you haven’t seen a million times before.

I used to have hope because I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to expect exclusion, to predict ostracization. Then it happened with such disturbing regularity that I became unable to imagine what it would be like not to expect exclusion, what it would be like not to be pining for that unattainable thing forever barricaded on the other side of societal pressures: more—play with me more—PLEASE. And it doesn’t just happen out there, in the world outside my bedroom, but in here, at the core of my relationships, during all of my sex: every time one of my well-meaning partners, in their lust, whispers “please fuck me” in my ear.

It didn’t take long for the calm horror to set in, the realization that I’m broken, and—worse—that everyone I ever love is going to suffer this pain because unless I see them empathize with this misery, I could never feel seen enough to love them.

I tried to maintain the pretense of friendship with The Professor and with C, but I couldn’t. Every innocent remark about playing that night in my apartment punctured my heart all over again. I smiled back at them, and they never seemed to suspect anything amiss. Over time, remarks about that night faded along with their memory of it, but by then their mere proximity—C’s beauty and the marks she loved showing off, The Professor’s suave flirting and his wild stories of the submissive women he was dating—were intolerable because my heart never healed. I started avoiding them at parties, declining invitations to events to which they had expressed an interest in attending. I don’t hate them, but I don’t miss them.

Earlier this year, Cookie left me a voicemail. She said she was writing a memoir of her coming out to the BDSM Scene, a story that is intricately entangled with my own story of the same, since her initial exposure not just to the BDSM Scene but to BDSM itself was through me. I told her I had no interest in revisiting the portions of my life with her in it and that she should not contact me unless I chose to contact her again, and good luck on her memoir.

These are some of the earliest people whose stories in my life end with, “And now we don’t talk to each other anymore.”

Nevertheless, sometimes I see their faces when I least want to; Cookie’s, C’s, countless other women I’d seen bottom, their partners’, the privileged shits, like Cookie’s dom, who thinks I’m “like an annoying five year old” asking too many questions. They were there, all of them, a composite in ghoulish form with that sick, molting flesh and that mean smile on the bondage chair that the PLA Dungeon Crew were moving in front of me: “Displays of privilege unshared are forever painful to the underprivileged.”

I hate bondage furniture. I wish I knew what it was like to be bound to it, and played with in it, and loved in it. But I hate the thought of it now, because I used to love the hope for it.

I hold my hatred close because I loved my hope too hard, and for too long, to be indifferent about wanting to have the kind of sex I want with the people I love. I can’t be indifferent, no matter how often I try to convince myself I’m being petty. Because it’s not petty to want the sex you like with the people you love. It’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity.

And that’s what The Scene doesn’t want you to know.

And why do I have this much trouble? Because the concept of eroticization itself has become a site of immense anguish. Every time something “swings my thoughts in that direction,” I hurt. And deeply. Read my archives and you’ll no doubt see I’ve become darker, more bitter, more jaded, meaner, more ugly. I’m scarred and scared and broken and horribly disfigured. And I’ve said all of this before.

To continue under the sabotaging influence of the epistemic abuse present in the euphemistically named “sex-positive” bubble in which I (try to) live, I’ve begun to tell pieces of my own story. I’ve dug up my own past experiences to use as inspiration because reading the experiences of others reliably sends me into a tailspin of outrage and jealousy and resentment.

What I’m trying to do in all of this is to get you—and everyone you know—to ask one simple question: “How did this happen to maymay?” If I’m really lucky, you’ll also ask the two obvious followups: “Is it happening to other people?” (the answer is yes, by the way) and “How can we make it better?” I’ve been staring at several drafts and struggling to make them coherent in order to lead my readers (and parts of myself) along that quest.

But in the meantime, Delving into Deviance published a post that I’ve been waiting to read from a self-identified dominant woman for a long, long time. Best of all, I could get to its end because it was mercifully free of the sexual triggers that so often make me “step aaawwaaayyyy from the computer!”

Her post is all old, but important news:

[P]ublic adoration (and objectification) of a male submissive is rare. As I’ve come to realize the fucked up state of femdom, I’ve concurrently become aware of the fucked up state of male submission – namely, it’s devaluation. While female dominants are made out to be some scarce resource, male submissives are depicted as a dime a dozen – common, and, even more disturbingly, weak and worthless.

[…]

What is it that makes dominant women uncomfortable with femdom? There are a lot of things. One of the biggest is the sexist attitude that is rampant in the BDSM community. It often seems like women have to remain ice queens, untarnished by actually having penile-vaginal intercourse with their male subs. However, if they want to they can become more male, and thus, more dominant by strapping on and becoming – duh duh duh – The Penetrator. This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with strapping on (I’m a fan myself), but a sex act does not a Dominant (or a submissive) make and we can’t just superimpose the male-female dichotomy onto Dominant-submissive and expect that to make anyone happy.

It’s not just female dominants who are getting a raw deal and are having to battle through a mire of expectations in order to engage in the kink they thought they loved. Male submissives find themselves in a community with very few potential partners. Of the potential partners, many will be professional dominatrices, and many (even non-pros) will expect their submission straight out of the gate because of a hidden assumption that if you’re a submissive man you must be willing to submit to just anyone. In defense of these Doms, the moment a woman signs up for any BDSM website she will get an influx of messages from men offering just that – men who want to be her “slave” who have never even had a conversation with her. However, after wading through these fantasists, a dominant woman will eventually find a man who fits her bill because she is valued, and thus, many men will be willing to try to do so.

Submissive men, however, have a much harder time. Because there is this perception of a ratio like 1:20 and because many submissive men either perpetuate the femdom icequeen-bitch ideal that no woman can or perhaps should live up to on a day-to-day basis, male submissives become devalued.

Some have suggested that female pro-dommes also devalue male submission (my boyfriend for one). I don’t think that pro-Dommes cause this problem, but I think that oftentimes they don’t help. Pro-Dommes meet a need. They are the supply to a demand. However, they contribute to the perpetuation of a picture of female domination that just doesn’t reflect real life. But they’re not the root of that problem. As a parallel, just because vanilla men have sex workers and porn doesn’t mean that they don’t know that they can’t expect the same look and sex acts from their girlfriends and wives. However, imagine a world in which vanilla men didn’t meet any women until they began encountering sex workers and porn. This could lead to a much more confusing dynamic for both those vanilla men and the non-professional women they might encounter.

(Emphasis mine.)

It’s not only extremely validating to me to read these words from someone else, it’s also extremely important to me that these words were written by a self-identified dominant woman. An unpopular truth is the fact that it is because of the fucked up attitudes Delving into Deviance describes (and that Thomas Millar described more academically) that it almost doesn’t matter how long I, maymay, a submissive man have been saying this—and publicly—for almost half a decade now. People just won’t listen or will derail me (sometimes with their own de-contextualized categorical privilege arguments; “but you have male privilege!”) nearly as much as they’re going to listen to a dominantly-identified individual.

That’s the same fucked up bullshit happening elsewhere. The feminist movement needs feminist men not because women are in fact weak, but because men have a privilege women do not. Black people need White allies. Similarly, submissive people need dominants to speak the fuck up with—not for, with—us.

On a personal note, it’s worth calling my own writing out as vicious and angry because when it comes to the niche of the BDSM community and its interactions, I am an angry, bitter, broken man. I wish I were some kind of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, filled with nothing but love for all oppressors. But I’m just not that perfect. I’m sorry. I’m really, really filled with sorrow about that. But that’s who I am now—hateful and doing my damnedest to direct that hate where it belongs, rather than where it doesn’t.

Some in the BDSM community think I’m a monster, a troll, or a troublemaker. Well, they made me. So ask yourselves, dear BDSM community: How did this happen to maymay? Because for as long as you don’t, there’s going to be a whole lot more “trouble” to come. I’ll see to that myself.

[A]ll of life is punctuated by stories, some more beneficial than others. At every stage narratives can prepare people for the future or steel them to bear the troubles and routines of the present. Moreover, these stories can disclose other folkways or recall past events that otherwise would be denied or forgotten.
—Anne M. Wyatt-Brown, The Power of Stories

When I first came out to the BDSM community in 2002, I was wary but optimistic. Years of reading about The Scene had left me far from starry-eyed and much closer to well-prepared than I think most people would have been in my shoes. So it was not actually much of a surprise that, after attending a TES Novice Group workshop, I found myself eager to find an environment more suitable for people my age—that is, young adults.

I was only 18, after all.

At that first meeting, I met a Columbia University student who went by the name of Virgil and who introduced himself as the Vice President of Conversio Virium. I learned from him that Conversio Virium, or CV as it was called, was a student BDSM education group hosted by Columbia and that met on Monday nights, and that I should attend. So I did.

In 2002, Conversio Virium was a very small place. Each weekly meeting was attended by no more than five or six individuals. Of those present, three were typically CV officers, then there was me—an odd addition as I was unaffiliated with the University but nevertheless still within the group’s target demographic—and, finally, the obligatory “creepy old guy” who’s present at pretty much every BDSM event the world over.

Few in CV today remember those days because few there today, if any, were there at that time. This fact is one of the invisible wedges that drove itself between the current crop of youth BDSM’ers in New York City and I after I returned from my year in Australia. Despite being chronologically younger than some of them, it is for this reason I feel unforgettably their elder.

Over the course of several years, I became disgruntled with The Scene and eventually left for a year or so in 2004. By the time I returned in 2005 (to be a demo bottom for a singletail presentation), I was pleased to discover that Conversio Virium had continued and, indeed, that it had grown slightly. Meeting attendance had jumped to an average of 9 or 10 people.

One of the new regulars was Eileen, whom I fell in love with for rekindling the spark of submission that The Scene had unmercifully beaten out of me over the three prior years. It generally does that to submissive men and, also generally, to dominant women. Although I was probably more prepared for The Scene than most young men, I was blindsided by the manipulativeness of its more socially-competent leaders, and I wasn’t aware of the multiple, intersecting entrenched bigotries present in this environment.

Meeting Eileen and, through her, an entirely new social circle of young, mostly queer kinksters who congregated around my old stomping ground of Conversio Virium was a breath of fresh air after the difficult, mostly solitary year I’d just had. Plus, I knew the ropes pretty well, and some of the older folks whom I knew from places like TES still recognized me. It was the closest I ever felt to being “home,” having heard the word used to describe The Scene by others so often.

It wasn’t quite home for me, though, because Eileen and I were still a bit of an oddity. We were then, and remained until we left for Australia, the only male submissive/female dominant couple. But we were accepted there and became, thanks to my familiarity with the larger “mainstream” BDSM community and her own seniority within the Conversio Virium crowd, certain kinds of leader figures for the group.

My time with Eileen, well-documented in the archives of this blog, was without a doubt some of the best times of my life. In 2006, a smear piece was written about Conversio Virium in the NY Daily News, and when conservative talking-head Ann Coulter was brought on to FOX News to discuss the seedy “sex clubs” in Columbia University, I revamped Conversio Virium’s website (see the 2004 version), doing what little I could at the time and the only thing I understood as activism: protecting my “home” and my friends. Thanks to Ms. Coulter, CV’s membership quadrupled almost over night, and suddenly we were the shining new center of youth BDSM education in the New York City and Tri-State area.

After that, weekly CV meetings averaged 35-40 people in attendance. Then in 2007, as part of the seemingly never-ending churn of newcomers, came a small man named Ken. He was a quiet boy at the time, almost silent, and seemed almost afraid to smile, far less to touch and be touched. He wore baggy clothes, glasses, and was taking computer courses for school, unsure of exactly what he wanted to do for a living.

Recognizing some of myself in him, I made it a point to greet him warmly at every meeting, and to talk to him openly in an attempt to get him to do the same. With no small hesitancy, he eventually disclosed his submissive self-identity along with some common sexual desires. He liked cross-dressing, he told me, and he wanted to be submissive to women.

He was, at first, often reluctant to join us for post-meeting dinner at the pizzeria (called Pinnacle back then on 115^th Street and Broadway), just off campus, but as I often gently cajoled him to join us he became less reluctant to the idea. He would sit at the corner of a table and I watched him smile at certain parts of our conversations, like discussions of men bottoming or in service to their tops—mostly the same parts I thought I would smile at if I were him. In a few short months it would be 2008, and Eileen and I would be headed to Australia, and we would have to say goodbye to the group.

So, wanting to ensure Ken’s place at CV, I encouraged him to run for Vice President that year. To my delight, he did, and I smiled to myself when I heard the news from the other side of the world. Australia, in the end, was a painful time for me, only in part (but no small part) because my relationship with Eileen did not survive the trip. I was eager to return to America in early 2009.

I will never forget the first play party I attended after I returned from my year in Sydney. It was difficult for me to go because I knew it would trigger so many memories I’d sometimes avoided. Nevertheless, I wanted very badly to have a good time and I thought that, maybe, I could make something of a fresh start.

When I arrived at the party, a half-naked young man with fresh bruises on his thighs and ass walked up to me and gave me a hug. I was taken aback. It was Ken. I almost didn’t recognize him.

“Ken!” I remarked, surprised at his openness. “You seem…good!”

“Yeah,” he said in that sort of far-away voice I remembered endorphin rushes induce.

“I’m glad,” I told him. And I was.

Ken cocked his head slightly and looked me straight in the eye. “Maymay,” he said, “can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“How do you get people to, y’know, play with you in ways that you really want?” he asked me. I blinked, slightly confused, almost dumbstruck.

I asked for an explanation, and he briefly told me of some of the play he’d had with people. It was fun, he recounted, plenty of new experiences and very nice. He talked of how he loved the physical connection and the whole ritual of negotiation, play, then aftercare. Although he didn’t remark on it, I could sense how relatively new, welcome, and unlike other social experiences it was for him. But all that said, he told me the play wasn’t quite what he wanted, and he found it difficult to describe to me the nuances between what he was experiencing and what he wanted to experience.

“Ken,” I responded finally, still holding him by the shoulders and feeling his arms around my waist, “I’m honored that you came to me to ask this, but I’m afraid you’re asking the wrong guy. I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe we can talk another time, when we’re not at a party.”

He smiled warmly, nodded, and said, “Yeah, okay.”

“Have fun tonight,” I told him.

“You, too,” he said to me before slinking away.

I stood near the middle of the room where we had just embraced, almost frozen. I watched him walk away, his slink turning to a scamper as he went off to go sit in someone’s lap. I felt a familiar storm brewing deep within me, so I quietly walked to the bathroom, shut the door, and locked it. I looked at myself in the mirror, as if about to ask my reflection what was happening.

On the one hand, Ken’s question and the brief retelling of his experiences sounded very familiar to me. On the other, here was this younger man, fresh from a scene he clearly enjoyed, asking me, fresh from a break-up and a year of feeling sexually and culturally isolated from everyone except my no-longer-partner, how to get play. I was, in fact, genuinely surprised. The pupil had become the teacher.

In the flash of a single moment, I suddenly felt emptier than I’d ever felt before, then—FLASH—I suddenly felt a wave of gladness, then—FLASH—I suddenly felt the rushing heat of unbridled jealousy, then—FLASH—the burn of resentment. I stared at myself in the mirror; the storm was behind my eyes.

Emptiness: What am I doing at this party? Why am I even here?

Gladness: In Conversio Virium those years ago, I had helped create a space where at least one young man not unlike myself had a better experience than I did when I first arrived there.

Jealousy: There, in Ken, I had just seen a young man I wanted to be and never will be. I never had someone welcome me at BDSM education groups in the warm, encouraging way I welcomed him. I never had someone talk with such genuine, gentle force with the express purpose of creating a social atmosphere in which I could feel comfortable disclosing my own desires.

Resentment: How dare the BDSM community fail me so spectacularly! How dare they perpetuate this rank failure of acceptance for submissive men like Ken and I? It’s not fair that I have to deal with this, that the daily reminders pile up, invading and ultimately destroying my own relationships!

Emptiness, gladness, jealousy, and resentment, all at once. I stared into my own eyes in the mirror for a long while. I think I was trying to calm the storms.

Eventually, I realized that although I couldn’t just snap my fingers and make everything better, hating the way things had been for me was a powerful motivator to make things better for others. So I resolved, mindfully, never to forget the power of discontent, of frustration, or of anger. Looking at myself in the mirror and seeing myself feeling emotionally conflicted, watching my eyes tear up at the same time as I felt my fists clench, I finally understood who and what I was fighting for.

I may one day be able to forgive those who knowingly or unknowingly contributed to my pain in the past, but I will never, ever forget.

We ought always hate the status quo. Always.

What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
Frogs and snails
And puppy-dogs’ tails,
That’s what little boys are made of.
What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And everything nice,
That’s what little girls are made of.

—Early nineteenth century nursery rhyme

I was 16 when I started, tentatively, to write about my sexuality publicly. I had already been soul searching privately for some time, but my public writings were largely confined to my bipolar disorder diagnosis and its relationship to my rejection of the youth-prison system commonly known as school. With a new, pseudonymous account on an early blogging platform called OpenDiary.com, however, I chronicled dreams, fears, and desires.

Then one day, my grandfather died, and I saw a side of my mom that I’d never witnessed so clearly before. I wrote this about it:

Almost two and a half weeks ago my mom’s father died. He was seventy-something and sick for almost a year before. I never really knew the man. In fact, I never really got to know any of my extended family. Most of them live in Israel, except for my mother’s brother (my uncle) who I don’t talk to that often anyway. They’re really more of acquintences than they are family.

So, I was just sad that my mom was sad.

[…]

I was expecting my mother to come home rather depressed and there’d be this whole awkward tension between us. That’s how it is most nights. I’m happier when she’s not around because we can both get quite territorial.

To my delight, nothing of the sort happened. In fact, quite the opposite. Like she usually does, she and my younger brother began talking. She was starting to tell him all about her trip.

[…]

I don’t talk to my mom about much, but many times I feel completely excluded because she’ll only talk like that with my brother. I’m partially to blame though. Communication and friendship is a two-person deal afterall. This time though, I went to the kitchen and all three of us talked for hours. It felt really good to be part of that.

[…S]he was really open and honest with everyone. The minute she got to saying that I thought about myself. I always do when people talk about honesty–even when I do. There’s still something I haven’t told her (or my brother) which I _really_ feel I have to. Only, she just got over the shock of my decision to drop out of school and all the years of bitter fights we’ve had, I’m scared to do almost anything that I think might make her upset.

So, here I am reading people’s diaries and actively trying my very best to promote a sense of tolerance and honesty among people and I’m laced with guilt about this one secret I need to tell the two of them–two of the very few most critical people in my life. I really am a hipocrit.

All in good time, I keep telling myself, but that doesn’t stop that painful pang I feel everytime something swings my thoughts in that direction. Because of the fact I’ve already told some people I know personally about this diary, I’m just going to leave this a smoking gun for now. Let’s hope the second act comes quickly.

We are all victims of our society, but none suffer more tragically than young people. And no suffering is more personal than our struggle for sexual freedom.

In 1992, when I was 8 years old, I went to watch the Disney movie Aladdin in the theater—I saw it six times that year alone. In one scene, Aladdin is locked to the wall of a dungeon with his wrists above his head. It’s one of my all-time favorite movie stills, even though the scene as a whole is frustratingly impotent. In fact, typical of Disney and throughout Aladdin, there was a fair deal of bondage imagery. What most people remember, however, isn’t Aladdin’s captivity scene at all. Instead, it’s the relatively ubiquitous image of Jasmine in shackles.

Since I was a very, very small boy, I have had to contend with a reality in which I feel a “painful pang…every time something swings my thoughts in that direction.” It’s like getting shocked by a jolt of static electricity. It’s like I’m somehow out of phase with the world. It’s an endless struggle to be viewed as culturally competent—or, sometimes, simply sane.

The “pang” is visceral. It burns me. It hits me deep in my chest. It skewers me first, then spreads to my arms, my legs, my palms, as though a cultural hole in my heart has drained them of blood. We are all victims of our society.

The injustices are small, but omnipresent; sexual death by a thousand cuts. It manifests in the way people look at me, talk to me, talk about me. It manifests in women’s eyes when they look away if I smile at them; they’re “supposed” to be coy and I’m not—so I can’t. It manifests in the clothes I feel comfortable wearing and the clothes I don’t—and where I feel safe wearing them, and where I don’t. It manifests in the counter-culture they say I belong to, and the ones they say I don’t. It manifests in fantasies I’ve learned to like because they are sexist. It manifests in what porn exists, and in what porn doesn’t—and in their explanations of why.

The choice our cultures—both the larger, mainstream one of which we are a part and the smaller, subcultures of which we are also a part—give us is simple: learn to enjoy your unnecessary shame, or you will find no entrance to enjoyment. “Rebel using taboo,” it goads you, “for in so doing you will recreate me even if you replace me with your own culture.” Its demand could not be more clear: suffer or acquiesce.

And so you do. Who could blame you? I try, but can’t.

You find refuge with a lover, or a partner, or a fuck buddy. And there you stay, protected, safe, ignorantly believing you feel “joy.” You lie there, in coital bliss, ignorantly believing that when you return to your job, or your family, or anywhere you are not comfortable, that you will be “happy” when you next see your love.

But you are not happy. You are contented. You have been drugged. Anesthetized. Numbed.

I go to sex parties and I hear the complaints of people there: “I haven’t played in three weeks!” FUCK YOU! I scream at them in my head. I go to public parties and I practically see the desperation dripping off (usually) older, (usually) submissive men. They leer intrusively, and so I often brace to barricade their advance. BACK OFF!, I scream inside, feeling trapped in a world between worlds. I don’t care if it’s been 50 years since you last played, you have no right to her!

This is a symptom. Our culture is sick. I still hope you will one day see what I see. I hope you will feel as I feel. But, for now, you seem content not to.

“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his life long. The mind that judges and desire and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions…. Suggestions from the State.”

—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Chapter 2

We are all victims of our society. Even—but not especially—the revolutionaries.

So, here’s my definition: “community” means a group of people who regularly interact socially within the same routines, typically at the same places, and often for the same purpose.

One example of a community? The group of people who go to sex-themed events and all know each other, who jump into one another’s conversations like they’re in a circle-jerk. You know the ones I’m talking about: divas at fetish parties, celebs at fundraisers and galleries with $75 a head admissions tickets, munches at those same ridiculously overpriced eateries, the coffee house whose owner is kinky and everyone always suggests meeting there.

I fuckin’ hate that community.

Now, since dem’s dere fightin’ words, let me define “I fuckin’ hate that community.”

When I say that, I don’t mean that I’d like to see that community destroyed. I think it’s got a certain value that’s really beneficial, especially to certain narrow slivers of people, and certainly to society at large. What I mean is that these social groupings incite within me an emotional response of such strong dislike that my feelings demand some kind of action.

Recognizing the value in something that I hate put me in a very difficult position for a very long time.

I remember a long, long, long time ago—a lifetime ago—when I was in New York City and a regular attendee at TES meetings. Elections were coming up and I had a lot of gripes about the way things were. The only two people I’d happily call friends at the time urged me to run for the board. I flat-out laughed at the ridiculousness of the suggestion.

“But you could do such good here,” they said.

“I don’t care about doing good here,” I replied.

And can you blame me? In the mid 00′s, TES was (and I’d put money on the table saying it still is) a sanctimonious pile of human dung whose board, it seemed, existed more so that its members can score play partners than actually do anything good for “the community.” And I don’t say this out of inference alone.

I remember—vividly—the very first “play party” I ever went to. It was in downtown Manhattan, at a converted dungeon space called Arena. I was 18 at the time, although I lied and said I was 21. I went with my then-partner, who went by the scene name “Cookie,” and who, several months earlier, I had introduced to the whole BDSM sex thing with a significant amount of trepidation using this book. (I even wrote a review of it the following year.)

At the party, a rotund man by the name of Bo Blaze, who Cookie and I had met a couple weeks earlier after he made a beeline for her at the first TES meeting we attended (where Boymeat and Luna were demonstrating flogging), sat with me at the back of one of the play rooms. He told me about how there were “wolves” in parts of the Scene, how things could be dangerous for newbies who didn’t know their way around, and how people like him—people respected in the community—were there to offer guidance and support around the whole subculture.

I knew part of that’s true; Cookie and I purposefully entered the Scene together, as a couple, with (readers familiar with me will be amused to know) myself as the dominant partner (“switch”) and she as the submissive. That half-pretense (we both switched with one another because we both leaned more heavily submissive) was specifically a protective mechanism for us, and for her especially, because by the time we joined we had both been reading enough bulletin boards and mailing lists and other material to know that certain social protocols were followed with a D/s couple—protocols like checking in with the submissive person’s partner that felt, to us, like they would offer some additional measure of safety—that would be missing with submissive-only self-presentations.

Months later, I realized that Bo, with his superb ability for social manipulation and, I should point out, as he often did, highly respected status as a TES Board Member, was not in fact interested in helping guide us—Cookie and I—through the subculture but rather merely interested in scoring playtime with her. Over the years, I heard him give the same exact speech, complete with “wolves” warning, to numerous other young couples that joined. And he was a shitty, do-little Promotions Chair, too, I heard from folks who worked with him. But that’s neither here nor there.

Cookie received her very first flogging at that party (yes, from Bo) and left the party feeling like she was on cloud 9. I left feeling fruitlessly optimistic, having had what amounted to an awkward conversation, but was described as some kind of mental play involving closing my eyes and talking. (Myself, Bo and another new-to-this-Scene-but-not-to-The-Scene woman named Alessandra were talking, and when she said she was a top, Bo took the opportunity to pair us and went to play with Cookie. Both feeling a little put on-the-spot, I think, Alessandra and I did the talking thing instead of any physical thing. Fair enough.)

For her part, Cookie, who had a thing for “Daddy” play, ended up his “little girl.” We broke up after she stayed the night with a smarmy NYU would-be journalist named Julian who, she told me on the phone the next day, started out wanting to play with her in a dominant role and then switched tactics mid-way through their scene and wanted her to top him. Typical douple-speaking douche-bag.

Cookie’s relationship with Bo soon fizzled in a relatively amusing fashion wherein she called me for some support, having recently moved to attend an out of state college. She was dating Boymeat at that time, too.

I’m reminded of all this because she called me recently, wanting to know if I’d sit down with her for an hour and talk about our past. She’s writing a book about it, she tells me. No, thank you, I told her, “that’s not a time in my life I want to recall memories from.”

So, I don’t think very highly of “the community.” Or perhaps more precisely, of “The Scene.” I think it’s putrid.

Yet it’s been completely inescapable for me because What It Is That I Do simply has zero visibility anywhere else. And so I’ve noticed a peculiar trend: when speaking with someone who considers themselves part of “the community,” I’ll hear something like, “Oh yeah, I know about Kink On Tap.” Or, as happened recently, “It’s hard to have a serious discussion on the femdom scene these days without someone mentioning Male Submission Art[…].” This is often a through-the-grapevine conversation, heresay from one person to another until it finally reaches my ears.

I think that’s peculiar because I haven’t put one iota of concerted effort into cultivating a listenership to Kink On Tap or a readership for Male Submission Art from within the Scene. I’ve frequently gone so far as to completely ignore and downplay promotional opportunities within that sphere. And yet I keep hearing these phrases from people who go to those community parties and events: “Oh yeah, I know about Kink On Tap.”

I guess that’s because I had roots there; I suppose this means people there know of me, even if they don’t know me. And maybe some of the things I’ve said even made some kind of positive impact I’m not around to witness. And that’d be great for would-be future me’s.

But as long as I’m doing this laying-myself-bare thing, let’s get one thing perfectly fucking straight: nothing I’ve ever done was for the Scene or the people in it. Not. A. Thing. Maybe that’ll help explain why I didn’t give a flying fuck that TES publicly made fun of KinkForAll New York City when it happened: none of it was ever for you. (See also: Scene rant.)

So who was it for?

Like I said more “nicely” the other day, it was all for the people who think they would like to be part of your self-satisfied circle-jerk with you. I used to want that. Now I know what a farce it is. I don’t give two shits about doing “BDSM community PR” work, to use Thomas’s phrase, a fact that made the anti-sex contingent’s attacks on me all the more ludicrous.

So, “community?” A fucking joke—sometimes literally. Fuck the community. I’m not interested in making those places better. I’m interested in making everywhere else better. And fuck, I wish more of you in the “community” cared more about that, too.

But I was right not to hold my breath because, as I said before:

[T]here is a fallacy, a lie, a self-protective disgusting self-consolement that the sex communities tell themselves to comfort themselves and hide their own massively, outrageously discriminatory practices[…]. And that lie is that those people simply “didn’t find the right space for them,” “wouldn’t fit in here anyway,” or some such bullshit. […S]ex communities do a fucking piss poor job of making it okay to want those things, and that in fact, sex communities are mostly filled with self-contented, complacent, lazy people whose actions make it clear they care more about getting their own lay than making it possible for other people to connect to them, or with others.

(This isn’t a word-for-word transcript, but it’s pretty close.)

Sadly, this may be one of the last, if not the last Kink On Tap shows—at least for now.

There’s so much I want to say and so much I wrote down to say and I don’t know if anything I could say could accurately sum up how I feel. But I wrote some notes and so I’m going to riff from them and I’ll do the best I can do and that’s all I can do.

Emma’s not here tonight. Neither of us wanted Kink On Tap to end, but at least for now, it looks like that’s what’s going to happen. Maybe there will be another show in the future, and maybe we’ll have a few more shows with the guests we’ve already scheduled, but I’m not sure anymore.

First off, although Emma isn’t here tonight, she told me she wants to make sure you all know how much she’s going to miss the shows and you listeners. She really enjoyed being a co-host on these shows and interacting with you all in the chat room.

For me, however it may have looked, it was extremely difficult. I was always struggling to put on a smile, and I think there were several reasons for that. But, the ones relevant to this monologue are that there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that I did to make sure Kink On Tap was able to be what it looked like to you; things behind the curtain you may not realize that I did.

In the early days of this show, I listened to every almost 2-hour episode we produced 4 times. Once in recording, of course, then after we recorded it, I listened to it while making very minor edits for clarity—removing pops and hisses and stuff. Then I imported it into GarageBand and added chapter markers and the musical track, listening to it another time. Then I exported it and published it and listened to the final product on my iPod, as you might, to evaluate my own work.

But that was just the show itself: there were also guests to wrangle and schedule, news stories and other people’s blog posts to read and summarize, decisions to be made about which topics would mesh with which guests, a show outline to create, the website to maintain, the wiki, not to mention how to learn how to do all of this audio work I’d never done before. And because I believe so strongly in transparency, there was also accounting to be done and financial information to make public.

And on top each week’s efforts to do that, there were personal challenges, like my own finances and trying to keep a full-time job at first (then quitting and finding part-time work, and so on), and getting mugged a few months ago, and a lot more, and heart-wrenching family problems, which I will not say anything further about here because it’s not my place to make that public.

It was a herculean effort to keep this show going, but I am no Hercules, and I simply could not continue to ensure that the show maintained the sort of quality that I cared for without equal efforting by my co-host and would-be collaborators, or others.

And I wanted to say all that about how much work I’ve been putting into this work because I want people to understand that I do understand the value of work. Because good work is hard to do and its outcome makes the product look like it was easy to do. And I get that, and I believe I do good work, and I’m capable of doing even more good work, but I’m not capable of doing it alone.

I did the work because I believe, if you’re going to set out to do something, then you might as well do the best you can. And so I was going to damn well do everything I could humanly do to make Kink On Tap the most professional production I could. And you know what, after more than a year’s worth of weekly episodes, I’m pretty damn proud of what we’ve accomplished.

We said a long time ago that we’d do this show until it was no longer fun. While Emma has been enjoying the broadcasts themselves, there was little else about the work of the show that she seems to have enjoyed. For my part, while I enjoyed the conversations I’ve had on this show with people, the amount of unmatched preparatory and post-production work I put into the shows overwhelmed whatever fun I might have had with resentment and bitterness.

And yet I kept doing the work, because I believed in what I was doing. Because I believed that this show made a difference in the lives of people who listened, and ultimately made this world a better place.

I’m reminded of one of our earlier correspondences with Gryphon, a man in London who, when angrily confronted by his parents about his sexuality, he told them to listen to Kink On Tap, and they did, and it helped them begin a dialogue because listening to Emma and myself and our guests on this show helped clear away the fear his parents had of what he was doing with his life. It’s a story I’ve held in my mind often because it reminds me that despite all appearances, people want to love one another and it is only the fear of what they do not understand that often keeps them from doing so.

I’m reminded of Ashbear, who wrote an email to me telling me that despite being told for years that being anything other than a normal, average, baptist girl was wrong, that listening to Kink On Tap disproved all of that, and that what we had to say on this show finally enabled some of her own self-hatred to begin to wane.

I’m reminded of everyone represented by “J”‘s email the other day, a self-described white, privileged and straight man who, despite voicing his hesitation to end his correspondence with me this way, signed his email to me “love.”

I wish I could befriend each and every one of you without the barrier of geographical distance, but I can’t.

This show, to me, was an attempt at proving to people that talking about sex didn’t have to be relegated to either the realm of secrecy and shame nor to the realm of eroticization and blatant sexualization. Unlike most shows about sexuality, especially ones that claim the moniker “kink,” this show expressly and purposefully tried to create conversations whose tone and ambience were just like the conversations you might have had over dinner with your grandmother on Thanksgiving—except filled with sex, politics, and religion, of course.

Because I believe the world needs a place for sex to exist that is neither on one extreme or the other. That people’s sexual rights and sexual freedom—which I define as an equal-opportunity circumstance for everyone on Earth to live a sexually satisfied, self-actualized, and autonomous life—can not be realized when there is no middle ground between sex-as-stigma or sex-as-erotica.

There are so many places, many of which we’ve talked about on this show, where sex is derided or hated or sexualities are marginalized or made to feel less than worthy. And although they are constantly attacked, demonized and threatened with censorship, there are also so many places where sex and sexuality is celebrated. But I never felt welcome in those spaces either, those places of sexual celebration, because I am not comfortable with outright sexualization, and the means of celebration that these places—places I call the sex communities—commonly used (be they parties, or dressing up in fetish wear, or whatever) often felt just as alienating and often just as downright fucking sexist and classist and exclusionary as what they said they were breaking free from in the hegemonic overculture.

And the fact that this show had a listenership in the several thousands, a fraction of whom were courageous enough to publicly express life-changing sentiment from listening, proves to me that there is a need for more such middle-of-the-road, interconnected sexuality spaces of the kind I attempted to create with this show, and KinkForAll, and my other works.

I remember myself in New York City, attending countless sexuality group meetings—groups like The Eulenspiegel Society, GMSMA, Poly-NYC, Conversio Virium, and others—and I remember a deep, dark pang of hurt every time someone who looked quote-unquote “normal”, who looked like they had wandered into the meeting by accident, or who looked like they could be your neighbor, your brother, your sister, your mother, your postal worker, whatever, when they walked into the meetings and expressed interest in whatever the topic at hand was—polyamory, BDSM, whatever it was—and then left at the end of the meeting and never, ever came back to another group meeting again. These people left those public sex community spaces and were never seen from again.

And there is a fallacy, a lie, a self-protective disgusting self-consolement that the sex communities tell themselves to comfort themselves and hide their own massively, outrageously discriminatory practices when this happens. And that lie is that those people simply “didn’t find the right space for them,” “wouldn’t fit in here anyway,” or some such bullshit. And I say that is a lie because, think about it, those courageous people who have spent god knows how much effort just to come to one of those places in the first place, overcoming the mountains of fears that mainstream culture piles on people about others—like us—who just think talking about sex others deem taboo are dangerous—those people don’t just walk out of those meetings and never have whatever their version of kinky sex is. No, they go home and they are still the same people, with the same kinky desires, the same cravings for sexual satisfaction that drove them to come out to that meeting in the first place. And to me, that showcases just how many thousands upon thousands of more people there are who want some kind of kink, some kind of so-called-but-not-really-at-all “alternative” sexuality in their lives—things they don’t get in sex community spaces. And not to discount whatever value they do provide to some, it tells me that sex communities do a fucking piss poor job of making it okay to want those things, and that in fact, sex communities are mostly filled with self-contented, complacent, lazy people whose actions make it clear they care more about getting their own lay than making it possible for other people to connect to them, or with others.

So that’s who I held in my mind every time I felt I couldn’t keep doing the work that I do anymore. Those people who came to a meeting, and then left because they weren’t “geeky” enough or were too “normal” or for some reason didn’t feel welcome by the over-sexualized, hegemonically-reinforcing so-called alternative communities they found. And that’s who I think of every time I looked at the download stats for Kink On Tap, thinking, hoping, that if one of those numbers was one such person, maybe the episode they listened to would offer some kind of avenue toward better, more accessible resources for them—because Kink On Tap, itself, is a resource, I think, unlike others. This show is not what typical self-described “kinky people” would have come up with if they were going to make a show called Kink On Tap. And that was the fucking point.

And, so, those stat numbers and the vision of someone who once left a sex community meeting because it wasn’t the place for them, just like it isn’t the place for me, of that person finding Kink On Tap and feeling just a little bit more at ease with who they really are, that kept me going for a while….

Words can’t express just how sorry I am to be ending this project, or at least putting it on hold, by which I mean there are no words to describe how full of sorrow I feel at this outcome.

This might sound like I’m being a quote-”Whiny bitch” about my circumstances—at least, that’s what some people, some friends, have said to me. And I’ve been called far worse, of course, for saying the things I believe about sexuality and the importance of acknowledging it as a fundamental human right.

I can take the negative attention. In fact, I feed off it. It makes me fight harder and think clearer and speak louder. But I can’t do any of that alone. Everybody needs somebody else. I feel like I have no one.

I can’t do this on my own anymore and the last two and a half years has been, for me, an experience of slowly, successively losing all the social support structures I once had in my personal life even as those very people accomplish and gain skills and create circumstances they wanted for themselves through their interactions with me. It fills me with some joy to know that I have such a positive impact on others, but that joy is swallowed whole by the depression of years upon years of not seeing that goodness return, in kind, to me—and as I hope my remarks about the efforts I put into this show and elsewhere make clear, it is not as though I somehow fail to understand the value of work. I do, and what I am saying is that there are obstacles systemic to the society in which we live that prevents many people—myself included—from having equal opportunity to enjoy the wealth happiness offers.

I cry almost every damn day for the simple reason that every damn day I crave a hug or the gentle weight of a hand on my back, all I have to turn to is the pillow in my bed. And god bless that pillow on my bed, because if it weren’t for that thing, curling up into a fetal position as I do every damn day would feel colder and more terrifying than it already does.

And I’ve been told for years now that I just need to mask this unending unhappiness, to smile and “fake it ’til I make it,” and reflect only on the good things, of which there are certainly quite a number, and that if I do this and simply don’t publicly show the hurt and the pain that I’ll find happiness after all. That I need to be “nicer” and less “confrontational” and make people “feel safer” around me. Safe from what? From my anger and my hurt and my pain. And now, finally, I realize that this advice I’ve been getting is bad advice because I can’t choose to numb one feeling—like anger—without numbing any other. I don’t get to say “I’ll have one scoop happiness, hold the sadness, thanks.” No! If I mask the anger, then all the happiness is masked, too.

A few weeks ago I went to the Poly Leadership Summit, and there I crystalized the idea that leaders who want to challenge the status quo need to find the people who are hurting the most, as compassion for them will train us to see the problems others say do not exist.

My point isn’t that I’m one of the people hurting the most, although I certainly am hurting a lot and—while I’m not in any imminent danger—I’ve been closer to suicidal in the past month than I ever have in the past decade. My point is that for all that I am hurting, I can see others who are hurting more than me, and although I can’t possibly fathom what their experience is like, I know making things better for them, through this show, through work on KinkForAll or my other projects, will make things better for me. Or so I believed for a very long time. And I still sort of want to believe that. And I believed that if I could get 1 person to see the importance of making the lives of people not-like-them better, I’ll have changed the world for the better.

But I’m no happier now. And that makes me very disappointed in myself, and in humanity.

So, with that said, I want to apologize to future guests we won’t have on, because you guys are probably pretty awesome and I would have loved to hear from you. And I want to apologize to my parents who I know watch every week and will be sad to lose another opportunity to feel like they can connect with me however indirectly, but especially to the few awesome volunteers like Gnosiseeker, who’s done so much to maintain the Kink On Tap Wiki.

And thank you to everyone who listened, whether you liked what you heard or not, but especially to those who said something about the fact that you listened—whether you said nice things or not—thank you. And even more so to people who donated some of their money or some of their time to participate somehow, either in the chat room or by sharing links with one another, or whatever; that was always the biggest deal to me.

There are a few of you who are donating once-a-month to Kink On Tap, and if you want to stop doing that I want to remind you that there are—and always have been—instructions for how to end your recurring contributions on the Kink On Tap donation page at KinkOnTap.com/donate.

Uncertain future

I’m not clear about what the future holds for Kink On Tap. I feel confident that there will be a show next week, probably spotlighting the importance of the Transgender Day of Remembrance, because I think that’s important and because a Kink On Tap listener actually spearheaded that effort. (Thank you, Maaya.)

The Kink On Tap website will remain online, and its archives will remain available and free for as long as I have the financial resources to make that happen. And who knows, since it’s a relatively streamlined process by now, maybe I’ll keep my linkblog there and the Kink On Tap Twitter account going with whatever spare energy or interest I have for it in the future.

Should they happen, I’ll keep scheduling future shows using the Calendar, but I’ve changed the website to clarify that Kink On Tap will no longer be a “weekly” standby. At least, not in the same form it used to be. And if somewhere in you there is interest and an ability to volunteer to make Kink On Tap run as it did before, or to grow it in some new way, both the feedback form and the volunteer application form will serve as a way to contact me about that.

Watch on Ustream.

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain in to joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.

So, when Sinclair asked me to read today, I was actually going to read a piece from my personal blog called “Men and Masks in Porn.” It was about the fact that in most of the porn I sought out, or found, when I was younger men are literally masked, not often for the sexual excitement of the thing but to hide their identity. We’re told that that is how men resonate with porn, that that would let us put ourselves in their places. That didn’t really do it for me at all.

And then, as I was thinking about what to say when I was speaking up here today, I kept getting drawn back to that Baptist proverb, that religious quote, because religion is one of the most powerful forces that exist in human history. Many people say it is the most powerful force, but it is in fact second only, I think, to sex. Not even religious guilt can stop or suppress any kind of human desire. I mean, there’s way more than enough news stories about…that.

So now, I understood the kind of sex that I wanted to have when I was really young, when I was about 10. And I started to look at pornography when I was 10, I found the Internet at that age, and I knew even then that it would be about 8 years or so before even the things that I wanted would be legal for me to have.

In fact, it’s still not legal for me to have some of the things that I want. I joined public sexuality communities at 18. I’m not allowed to consent to certain activities I’d like to consent to. Several people want to make certain things—sodomy, for example—illegal. And I know that for some of you in the audience today, it’s not even legal to be who you are. Many of you are forced to compromise half of yourselves—one half or another—just by putting M or F on any number of government forms.

So I’m thinking about all that as I’m growing up, and as a teenager I’m finding various representations of what I’m told I should want. And so I’m watching porn, and—this is me at like, 15 or 16, or 17, or 18 or so—I’m masturbating to it, and my dick is hard in my hand, and I’m crying because it’s not resonating, it’s not what I actually want, it’s not me there.

I think I’ve become so good at seeing what I want to see. In fact, you know, when I look at porn sometimes I change the genders around in my head. As a sexually submissive guy myself, I look at a lot of BDSM porn, a lot of women bottoms, and I’ll change the genders around in my head. When I see a woman tied up, I think, “It’s okay, I’ll just imagine them as a guy, someone like me.” Or when I see men, I’m like, “What are their faces like?” Because, again, masks. So I’ve become so good at seeing what I want to see that instead of seeing what there is, it’s become difficult for me to see the world as it is, and to take off my own lens. I think that’s probably one of the first masks that I’ve been almost traind to put on, out of my own desire.

And the more I looked at porn the more I realized I really wasn’t interested in seeing images of sexuality that aroused me, I was much more interested in seeing images of sexuality that reflected mine, so I could connect with them and see myself represented in that image and have a validation that I actually exist, that other people are like me there.

So I started to create spaces. One of the projects that I run is a website called MaleSubmissionArt.com and it was really designed around this idea: “You cannot be what you cannot see.” So I started to ask people to send me images of male submissiveness and masculinity in a submissive sexuality context. And the responses I got to it were absolutely astonishing. Some of the responses were from submissive women, which I could never have dreamed of getting. Here’s one of them:

I just wanted to thank you. I am a young woman and even though I’ve known I was submissive for quite a while, I’ve had a hard time reconciling that with my strong personality. Your comments, though, have inspired me to go looking for a dom willing to work as hard for me as I’ll work for them. I’m pretty sure you’ve changed my life for the better and I sincerely appreciate it. Thank you.

This desire to create spaces where we’re represented, I think, is common to many of us and many of us are trying to forge what I believe is a very new morality. One in which behavior towards other people is really geared not towards how we would like to be treated but on how they, themselves, would like us to treat them. I realize that’s a radical concept to some people but I think it’s very important and that’s not how we’re told we should behave.

About many of the spaces I’ve created, many submissive men have told me–you know the kind, a little creepy, not really very well-suited to public spaces, kind of hard to talk to–many of them have said, “Thank you for writing the things that you do. There aren’t many men who speak about the things you speak about.” They seem very lonely to me.

In their pain, I found a lot of validation because I understand that and I’m, truly, very lonely. When they thank me for what I write I understand the importance of my work. Having created those spaces, I really felt like I needed to distance myself from the very communities I went out to join at 18–they weren’t the spaces for me–in order to create new spaces.

I run an Internet talk show called Kink On Tap (at KinkOnTap.com). One of the responses that I got from there in another email was someone who wrote to me and said:

You’ve brought me more than a bit of peace on [the subject of my sexuality]. It’s nice to know that I’m not alone. Even though I was told over and over in my childhood that being anything other than the average, normal, baptist girl was a bad thing, reading your blogs and listening to Kink On Tap disproves all of that and I’m delighted to say a small amount of my own self-hatred is beginning to wane. And for that alone, I thank you so much.

So, people often ask me why I do the stuff that I do. And to that I’ve started answering with this question, which is: “What would you do after you’ve given up? After you’ve given up on having a sexually satisfied life? On having what you want?” My answer to that is anything you need to do to stay alive.

The correspondences that I get keep me alive when I feel like I’ve despaired. And I feel like I’m making people’s lives better. That’s the only currency I think I have—it’s not money, it’s not friendship, it’s not loyalty, it’s not sex—it’s doing. Actually doing. Action. So this new morality based not on commandments we’ve received but on affirmations we define for ourselves, I think, is how I keep myself alive and how I hope others will do the same, changing the world for the better.

People say changing the world is hard, that it’s a difficult thing to do. I think that’s not true. I think many of you in the audience by your mere existence here are changing the world. And it’s not changing the world that’s hard, it’s staying alive to do the work that’s difficult.

So what I want more than anything else in the world is to find other people like myself. People who are bored by complacency, who are exhausted by inaction, and who are stimulated by that discomfort. Because I think no one’s sexual rights—not one person’s—are assured unless all people can have the consensual relationships of their own choosing.

So if nothing else, for the love of love, reach out to someone and tell them that they are not alone. Connect with people so that they feel less alone. Those emails literally keep me alive. Email a friend and tell them about this reading series, encourage them to come out here, because too many people still think that they are alone when they are not.

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.

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.

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?