Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

Saturday, May 31, 2008

Article published in Kink-E magazine: Learning the Ropes

Category labels: BDSM psychology, BDSM safety, Beginner BDSM, Communication, Community, Femdom, Male sexuality, Myths and misconceptions, Personal experience, Personal history, Writing and blogging

I’ve been somewhat silent on this blog for a little while and some of you probably already know why. For those that don’t, my professional life has been all a twitter with all sorts of tasks related to my first (non-BDSM or sexuality-focused) book publication. That’s quite exciting, but it also means I’ve pretty much taken on another part time job in addition to my full-time one.

A while back before any of this began I submitted an article to a small local kink magazine here in Sydney called Kink-E Magazine. Apparently it’s been accepted and published and I never even knew about it. You’d think I’d get an email or something of the sort (if not an author copy), but I’ve not heard a word from the publishers. The only reason I found out the article was published was because I met a nice fellow at a dinner party of sorts who recognized my name and said he’d found this blog through the magazine.

Another very annoying thing is that apparently the magazine decided to print my article—which includes a picture of my back—on top of a large picture of a submissive, bound woman and some other random picture I’ve never seen before. I’m not claiming I should have had artistic input for the layout, but doesn’t it seem more than a little disingenuous to print an article about a submissive boy with a huge picture of a submissive girl behind the text of the article itself? This might be a great time for another one of my rants about the state of acceptance for submissive male sexuality but in deference to my exhaustion, I’ll let it slide without another word this time.

$Scanned image of \"Learning the Ropes\" article text$ (Click to enlarge.)

Sigh…. Either way, I’m glad to see that the article is in print, and that it’s providing this blog and the great blogs I link to some additional exposure. Since the magazine’s website has seemingly gone from a partially free online publication to a closed “we won’t show you our content unless you pay us” model, I’m going to repost the entirety of my article here for your viewing pleasure.

This article was a part of my efforts to encourage educational events focused on BDSM and alternative sexuality (beyond queer or homosexual issues) in the Sydney area. See also My First Two Months in the Sydney BDSM Scene.

I still remember [my partner] Eileen’s face the first time she talked to me about hitting me with a single tail whip. “It makes a completely different noise when it hits skin,” she said, brimming with excitement. I gave her a knowing grin. When the two of us began playing together regularly she was the new-blood and I was the one with the reputation.

Her enthusiasm and eagerness to learn more and to try new things was enthralling, attractive, seductive. Sometimes she would tell me that her fingers itched, that they wanted to hurt me. I wanted nothing more than to give her unfettered access to me to do just that.

I think ‘access’ is a sexy word. It’s seductive in implication, explicitly slippery on the tongue, and just sounds raw. Even its meaning is primal: a means of approaching or entering a place, or person. Part of what I found so enthralling about playing with Eileen was how much her newness to the kind of play we were doing was teaching me things, too. Contrary to the popular stereotypes, I didn’t actually have much hands-on experience at the time.

For a lot of people, the answer to the question “When did you know you were into this BDSM stuff?” is very similar. It goes something like, “I’ve known as far back as I can remember.” I’m no exception.

I was four years old when I started making requests of my father to tie me up. At that young age, I wasn’t really questioning why I was asking this of him, I just knew that it was something I felt like I really wanted to have happen, something that would relax me. As a boy, I liked crawling into small spaces like the one under my bed or in my closet. At night I would wrap myself up in a cocoon of my sheets to relax, enjoying the compression and tightness of the fabric on my body.

When I was nine my family got a computer connected to the Internet for the first time. By the time I turned ten I had several hundred bookmarks of BDSM resources saved on the computer. I started reading each one voraciously. Thousands of words a piece, all about sexual dominance and submission, straight-out sex, sexuality, sadism, masochism, and erotica of course.

At first, most people look aghast when they learn this about me. In what world would exposing a ten year old child to endless information about BDSM sex be a positive experience? Indeed, I believe there are myriad dangers in doing so, arguably more so with today’s Internet than the one of thirteen years ago.

To be certain, that kind of access to information is Pandora’s Box. Looking in hindsight at my own experiences, as I’m sure Pandora must have done, I can now see both the good and the bad. The bad: misinformation, and deceitful, predatory, or just plain misguided people. The good: information in abundance, and a community of like-minded people.

For more than eight years I lurked in cyberspace, reading other people’s experiences. I spent a lot of my time filtering out what I thought was fanciful fiction from what seemed like an accurate representation of events and fact. I learned safety basics such as risky parts of the body to strike (kidneys, the tailbone, the neck, etc.), which led me to pursue other interests in anatomy.

Finally, together with my first kinky girlfriend, the two of us braved the real world together. We went to our very first BDSM-oriented meeting at The Eulenspiegel Society. It was a lecture-plus-demo-style presentation on flogging by the well-known Boymeat and his partner at the time, Luna.

“Not everyone plays this way,” I remember Boymeat saying with ernest while locking his gaze straight at my girlfriend and I, who—dressed in our casual cottons and Birkenstock sandals—stood out like a pair of sore thumbs in the crowd of some thirty-odd much older people wearing leathers, vests, and other black accoutrement. “Because we know one another,” Boymeat continued the caveats to his demo, “Luna and I play very roughly together.”

Little did he know at the time, but he didn’t need his caveats. When he began the demo and his flogger literally shoved Luna into the wall she was standing near, I was endlessly intrigued. Here, now, I could finally see with my own eyes everything that I’d been reading about for nearly a decade.

I realized that I could once and for all put to rest dozens of questions that I’d had about flogging and begin to answer dozens more. Watching, I remembered descriptions about flogging I’d read online and started cataloguing some as plausible and others as fantasy, distinctions I could not be confident of just twenty minutes prior. The experience of attending that presentation was invaluable, and for years following that attending similar presentations proved very rewarding for a lot of different reasons.

On a very personal level, spending time with other people who had similar desires as I did helped to legitimize my own thoughts and fantasies. It also showed me just how social an activity education really is. The vast majority of learning happens in the presence of either peers or teachers (or sometimes someone who is both). This is even more apparent in a community like ours that is heavily focused on physical, social experiences, either with a single partner or with a group.

Education, like sex and play, is a social activity—and learning can be very sexy. This makes face-to-face education even more valuable because, in addition to being the single most effective measure against accidents, abuse, and other negative consequences of ignorance, it can also provide opportunities to make friends and to network with others. At that first TES meeting I attended, I met Virgil, now former Vice-President of Columbia University of New York City’s BDSM discussion group called Conversio Virium, where a few years later I first met Eileen at a single tail demo I participated in.

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Monday, April 21, 2008

How to present an educational BDSM topic and not make it boring

Category labels: Communication, Community, Kink events

The other day, Eileen and I were absolutely thrilled to present Sexual Teasing and Denial at the inaugural über Skill Share Workshops hosted by the generous (and fabulous) Mistress Dee at her über dungeon and BDSM playspace. Eileen and I have done this presentation quite a few times before, once at TES-TNG, once at Conversio Virium, and once at the first-ever Floating World. I’m not at all exaggerating when I say that this time, the presentation was the best it’s ever been, with an uninterrupted nearly two-hour long talk that included wonderful questions from and discussion with the audience.

Earlier, I wrote that I think the Sydney BDSM scene is suffering from a lack of educational programming. I’m glad that I’m not the only one that thinks so. I’ve had numerous conversations with people in the scene here who would like to start seeing educational events becoming common place, and many Australians are eager and able to contribute. Especially noteworthy in this arena is Mistress 160, who runs what is probably the best informational blog about BDSM in the entire region, and has been doing so for quite a while.

Of course, the World Wide Web is probably the single greatest tool we as kinky people have in our efforts to educate each other and make information easily accessible. Bridging the gap between the online world and the physical world, however, isn’t easy. Ultimately, every Web site and cyberspace venue is really a support structure for meatspace venues and real-world events where people meet with other people face-to-face. That’s why I was so excited to be involved in helping to get the über Skill Share Workshops off to a roaring start.

Now, back in the United States, Eileen and I have done a few other presentations in the past in addition to this one on chastity, orgasm denial, and orgasm control. We’ve been in attendance at countless others, too.

Some of these presentations were really fantastic. At a minimum, these kinds of presentations always made me want to go straight home and pull Eileen into bed with me, or at least go out to dinner afterwards and have a long debate about whatever the topic of the presentation was.

Unfortunately, most of the time I didn’t really find presentations that engaging at all. In a few of the worst cases, I’ve literally fallen asleep. That’s right, I’m in a room full of people who are all talking about sex and BDSM and getting off and it’s been so boring that I’ve literally fallen asleep.

Over time, I’ve learned that there’s a distinct skill in teaching or speaking to others about what you know that’s entirely separate from just being good at that thing you’re talking about. So, in an effort to document some of those things that should probably be common-sense but clearly aren’t, here’s a list of things you can do to make your presentation for a BDSM educational event not suck.

Be enthusiastic

Chances are that if you’re presenting on anything at all you’re presenting on a topic of personal interest. Since this is supposedly something that really gets your rocks off, it should be easy to be animated and enthusiastic while presenting about it, right? Wrong! For a lot of people, it’s actually very difficult to feel comfortable and relaxed enough in front of a room full of people to let their genuine enthusiasm show. That’s okay, and this gets easier with practice.

That said, there’s nothing worse than listening to a monotone voice for an hour straight. Enthusiasm on behalf of the presenter begets enthusiasm on behalf of the audience. One of the best ways to loosen up and show some enthusiasm if you’re having a hard time of it is to tell personal stories. Share a short anecdote about a time at a club when you saw this amazing scene and how it made you all tingly. Don’t wax poetic about days long gone—stick to the topic at hand, but show some personality. Trust me, if you love what you’re talking about, your eyes will light right up.

Of course, the reverse holds true, as well. If you’re not actually excited about the topic you’re presenting on, why are you even presenting on it in the first place?

Prepare talking points, not a script

I think that in the entire history of the Universe, no one’s ever gone to an educational event just to listen to someone read aloud what they could have read themselves. If you have a handout, use it as a reference or as supplemental material, not as a script or the meat of your presentation. Chances are that by the time your presentation has started, everyone who received a handout has either finished reading it or has decided it’s not worth reading. If you just read what you’ve given them, you’re not going to have added any value to the presentation. You might as well have just emailed everybody your handout and stayed home.

That’s not to bash the usefulness of such things. Handouts can be wonderful reminders for people to take home with them so they can recall what you’ve said. They can serve as an outline of your presentation so that you can ensure you hit all the major points you wanted to hit. You can put together supplemental material in the form of a handout for people to peruse at their leisure, after the presentation. Just don’t obsolete yourself with it.

Don’t just demo, inform

Way too many presenters get caught up in the idea that their presentation is some kind of act, as if they are putting on some kind of show. If you’re at a fetish club and you’re doing some kind of BDSM performance art, then fine, you’re putting on a show. At educational events, however, this is like shooting yourself in the foot. Remember that you’re not there to show off, you’re there to inform people about a topic.

If you just spend the whole presentation playing with your demo bottom and not actually talking the audience through what you’re doing, you’ll be seen as an ego-centric opportunist who’s just interested in playing in front of a captive audience. On the other hand, if you actually walk the audience through the subject matter, both visually and verbally, you’ll be praised and heralded as an expert. And then you can go show off at the next party you’ve suddenly found yourself invited to.

Know your shit, but don’t be a know-it-all

Recognize that presenting on a topic is not the same thing as knowing that topic inside and out. That said, you’d be hard pressed to give an informative presentation if you don’t know your subject matter really well, so be certain you do. Spend some time talking to friends or people at parties about the subject you’re going to be presenting on so that you can get familiar with what other people might ask you about it. This also gives you the opportunity to practice explaining it to others.

Of course, if you’ve been asked to be a presenter, it usually means you’re seen as someone who knows a great deal about something specific—but not always. Presentations are sometimes just as much of a learning opportunity for the speaker as it is for the audience, and both parties can benefit from an arrangement such as this. When your fifteen minutes of fame arrive, don’t be a know-it-all. You never know when you might learn a thing or two that you can then add to your next presentation about the same topic.

All right, that’s quite a bit of advice. If I’ve missed anything, feel free to add your own input in the comments. :)

Comments (4)

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Why Orgasm Logger? Well, why not?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then another guy echoes her sentiment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, Lux of Boinkology said it best:

We’re both fascinated and confused by this application

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s what I’m puzzling over.

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

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Saturday, December 29, 2007

It doesn’t matter if she’s got a brain when your dick is in her

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Communication, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Erotica and pornography, Masochism, Sex

The other day, Debauchette wrote the introduction to a post called On Boys and Pornography that promised to be a very interesting one.

If you say, “Can I come on your face?” or if you try to come on my face, I’ll assume you’ve watched a great deal of porn in your life.

Indeed, porn influences men’s (and women’s) expectations and ideas of sex, what it should feel like, what it should look like, and what we should think about it. I first discovered pornography back in 1994 when I was ten years old and was given free reign to explore the Internet. “Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!” most parents would cry in knee-jerk outrage, but I’d urge adults to entertain a more level-headed approach to the situation (which is not to say that I, nor my parents, approve or have ever approved of minors having free access to pornography by any means at all—but that is neither here nor there at the moment).

Since then, I do see certain and undeniable ways in which my exposure to pornography has affected my sexual development, and it has definitely impacted how I have sex today. I have, of course, seen a lot of visual pornography. Despite this, I think anyone who knows me would agree that there’s a distinct difference between how I approach those parts of social interaction that are sexual and how people of whom they say have “seen too much porn” do so.

This is why I was looking forward to Debauchette’s second piece: why are some men’s exposure to porn seen as the cause of an issue that I clearly know can not possibly, in isolation, be the entire story that explains the malicious intent these “porn-addicted” men seem to have? Turns out, she didn’t write the post I thought she might have, which makes me smile and want to take her out to diners to keep on talking about it over coffee re-fills somewhere.

When I take issue with porn, it’s the quality I dislike, not the genre. I dislike the tedium, the predictability, the fake tans, the plasticky breasts, the baseball caps, the lack of imagination, the boredom, the soundtrack, the lighting, the dialogue, the inauthentic orgasms, the lingerie, the decor, the overall assault on my sensibilities. But when porn’s good, it blows my fucking mind.

Nodding as I read this, these reasons are also why I consistently decry porn, even “alternative” porn, to be monotonous representations of the very same going-through-the-motions activities that are just not exciting on anything other than a vicarious, or worse, detached experience after the first or second viewing.

Yet two things beyond Debauchette’s well-made points struck me about her post. In this paragraph,

When I say that I can sense if someone’s watched a lot of porn, or too much porn, what I mean to say is that I can sense that their relationship to sex is largely visual. […] Since 90% of my libido is fueled by the physical chemistry and psychology (or, in rare cases, emotion) of the experience, in those situations I just prefer to go home and jerk off on my own. Sometimes to porn.

Debauchette claims that 90% of her libido is fueled by the “physical chemistry and psychology” of the experience of sex. Only rarely, she says, are her emotions involved in the lust. This is very interesting.

It’s interesting to me because, with recent analyses of my own thoughts and feelings, mostly regarding no-strings-attached (or “NSA”) sex, my explorations are increasingly leading me to discover what it is about sex that I find arousing, and therein lies a new distinction. Things that I find arousing are not necessarily the same things or the same reasons that get me to orgasm. In other words, things that make me attracted to a person are not necessarily the same things that I want to get off to.

The best example of this is intelligence, a display of which is the easiest way to get me to crush on you. Meeting someone who displays intelligence and talks about sex that way makes my dick rock hard. I mean real hard, and real fast.

Anyone with enough intelligence can probably turn me on in one way or another. Even exceptionally smart people I despise, I’ll admit, have sometimes appeared in fantasies torturing me with their arguments with which I disagree—and with a lot of psuedo-consensual, psuedo-forced sexual advances, of course! (Seriously. They’re some of the absolutely nerdiest fantasies I have ever had.) Smart people are sexy to me by virtue of their smarts.

However, that said, I don’t always (though, again, I do sometimes) find that their intelligence is what I’m after when I ask them for play, or for sex. To put it really painfully bluntly, the horribly politically incorrect phrase “it doesn’t matter if she’s got a brain when your dick is in her” holds true.

When it comes to sex, the reasons I’m attracted to someone are often the reasons why I want to have sex with them, but they’re not necessarily the same. Maybe the key to understanding “casual” sex, then, is to be able to consciously shift my focus from the thing that was attractive to the thing that is hot. Practically, still using the intelligence example, this means that I’m not going to be very attracted to a gorgeous bombshell who can’t put a sentence together, which means I’ll never have sex with that person in the first place.

This is enlightening because it highlights a distinction between what is attractive and what is orgasmic, for want of a better word. That’s an important distinction, because it plays right into the reasons why some people can find themselves fulfilled by cruising for no-strings-attached sex and why I seem to have been unable to do so, yet it also offers an explanation (or at least hope of one) to explain why my interest in “casual sex” (and, to a lesser extent, “casual play” in the kinky sense) is not a doomed endeavor.

The second thing that struck me about Debauchette’s post was this following part, not because of any unique insight but because of its common-sense value:

Porn will get better. But also, I suspect extensive sexual experience and a modicum of self-awareness will mitigate its influence.

Specifically, extensive experience with sex is valuable, when tempered with self-awareness. Those of us with a sex drive know this intuitively, and we are drawn to sex by our instincts. It’s a part of what makes us happy, and human.

Sex, especially the kind of sex I like to have, is also risky. Kinky sex is much riskier than vanilla sex for a whole host of reasons, many of them plainly obvious; my kind of kinky sex typically involves the heavy use of restraints, percussive implements, lots of roughness, and intense psychological stimuli that crank up the volume for things like power inequality skewed to my disadvantage. If I place this power in the wrong hands, such as someone with malicious intent, it’s obviously going to be dangerous and perhaps even downright lethal for me.

Yet even for vanilla people, sex can be dangerous, and is risky. This is why extensive experience is often denounced as a “Bad Thing”; the more you do it, the higher the chances of something going wrong. Nevertheless, extensive experience is obviously valuable, because it’s the only way to corporeally understand (duh!) what’s going on physically, emotionally, and even spiritually (if you’re into that sort of thing). This isn’t to say that it’s necessary to do this with multiple partners, unless the whole many-partners-thing is what you want to corporeally understand of course, nor is it to say that there aren’t other ways of learning about these things that aren’t intrinsic to the physical experience, but—especially for me—experience is the greatest teacher.

So how do you balance this risk with its obvious potential reward? Like anything else, you have to become educated about the topic in general and, more importantly, about you specifically. It’s nothing knew, and you’ve heard it before, but it’s true: “know thyself,” and then when it comes to sex, I’d like to add “and then explain thyself.” As it happens, pornography can be a very helpful tool to learning more about your sexual self but it can’t be expected to be a good substitute to corporeal self-examination or emotional self-awareness.

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Friday, December 28, 2007

Three easy steps to meeting and playing with people in BDSM clubs

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Beginner BDSM, Communication, Femdom, Fetish, Foot worship, Myths and misconceptions, Stupid dominants, Stupid submissives, Vanilla life

While filling the Conversio Virium calendar with other group’s events to publicize to the CV crowd, I came across a curious meeting topic that DomSubFriends (one of our local NYC BDSM groups) is going to be presenting on shortly. It is a presentation, taught by a dominant man and intended for other men regardless of their various potential orientations (or so one is led to believe from the description), about how to be more successful when trying to meet partners. It’s called “Why can’t I meet someone? (In the scene!)”.

I have to say that I’m glad this topic is being brought up at a local kink group. I also have to say that whenever it’s been brought up in the past, it’s been a miserable failure of a presentation with no insight and nary a good point being made by the presenter or the audience. But maybe this time will be different….

Of course, it is an oft-cited criticism of the BDSM scene that many men have: “It’s too hard to meet women!” Indeed, many men feel that their attempts at engaging members of the opposite sex are consistently unsuccessful. What many men fail to note, however, is that women decry the experience of trying to meet a partner just as much, usually with the similarly oft-cited complaint: “Why is every man who talks to me so obnoxious and weird?”

In my decidedly not-as-vast-as-other-people’s personal experience and observations, there are a few key guidelines that have proven themselves to be invaluable to me personally and have been present in every successful pre-play interaction I have witnessed—ever. Astonishingly, very few men actually seem to follow these three simple steps, which apply regardless of situation, circumstance, or participants involved:

Vanilla rules apply. Just as certain common-sense rules of etiquette are followed in non-kink spaces, so too must they all be followed in kink spaces outside of a scene. If you’re not invited to be a part of someone’s scene, that means you’re not in a scene, clear? Being in a BDSM dungeon does not implicitly grant anyone the right to be rude to, to invade the personal space of, or otherwise behave poorly towards anyone else, no matter who you are or who they are. End of story.
Make conversation. Nine times out of ten, if you ask someone to play with you before you even say hello, you’re going to get turned down. Think about it: do you walk up to random women in bars and ask them to have sex with you? No, you talk to them first, you flirt. Do that in a BDSM club, too. If there’s some chemistry in the conversation first, then the apple of your eye is much more likely to say yes when you broach the topic of playing together.
Be generous. Give and you shall receive. If you get turned down, be gracious and accepting about it. There’s nothing more damaging to your search for a play partner than to be seen acting like a big baby that can’t handle rejection politely. On the other hand, if your offer to play is accepted, then do something you are both going to like when you play and make sure your play partner knows how much you’re liking it while you’re playing.
If you’re topping, this means you top with enthusiasm tempered with lots of care. If you’re bottoming, this means you’re reacting to what she’s doing because, remember, she wants to be having an effect on you. I don’t think I know a single top who doesn’t like noise, or squirming, or something of the sort as long as it’s an authentic reaction and not a big phony act. Conversely, almost all of them really dislike playing with a stubbornly stoic, silent, expressionless bottom.

It’s unfortunate that when something isn’t working, many men simply try to do more of the same. If asking ten women to let him rub their feet didn’t work, he’ll just try asking another fifty, thinking one of them will eventually acquiesce. Sadly, this just doesn’t work. “Trying harder” without entertaining some kind of introspection is nearly guaranteed to fail every time.

The only cure for desperation is alternatives. If something’s not working for you, for goodness sake, give something else an honest try.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

The boy next door is also bisexual

Category labels: Bisexuality, Communication, Community, Gender fluidity, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Polyamory, Sex

Today I was wandering around the blogosphere and found a link via The Sex Carnival to this report on a poll about the prevalence of bisexuality that made me stop and think. The brief article touches on quite a few topics that I am finding immediately relevant. These topics are:

Hostility towards bisexual-identified people, most confusingly from gay- and lesbian-identified people.
A lack of cohesion and inertia in the bisexual community, who often identify with some other community instead (gay, lesbian, kinky, poly, etc.).
The harm that is caused by a simplistic understanding of communication, particularly when using language.

These topics are of obvious interest to me because they each affect my social spaces. One of the more startling findings of the poll is that there are apparently more than twice as many bisexual women as there are bisexual men. Or at least, of course, more than twice as many that feel comfortable identifying themselves as such in this poll.

The poll of 768 people, conducted last month, shows in its adjusted final tally that 15.4 percent of respondents are bisexual men and 33.5 percent are bisexual women.

In my personal experience this ratio is even more skewed, but I’m willing to give this finding some credence. To be brain-dead simplistic about the issue, one can say that women who identify as bisexual have an easier time of coming out about it because they just don’t face criticisms from as many fronts as men who identify as bisexual do. Specifically, bisexual women are stereotypically stigmatized only by lesbians, whereas bisexual men are stigmatized by both gay men and by straight men.

One of my strongest dissatisfactions with many of the gay men I’ve interacted with is their blindness towards gender fluidity and how that affects eroticism. This is perhaps one reason why I find myself having trouble finding these men sexy after they open their mouths. They seem so singularly focused on their own version of the masculine ideal that they ignore what I find to be important pieces of my femininity that are necessary to my own erotic fulfillment. The exceptions are the gay men who seem to enjoy femme-y boys, but even in these instances coming out as bisexual seemed to disqualify me to them.

“It’s sad to me that gays and lesbians have such a hard time standing by their bi brothers and sisters,” she said, “because we are really in this fight together, about having our love lives and families validated and respected, no matter what gender we love.”

On the flip side, I have intense trouble socializing with straight men. Consistently, the only straight men who I seem to be able to get along with are the ones who are either sensitive to issues of gender or sexuality (such as those already involved in a sexuality community) or those with whom I can talk technology. When my coworkers invited me out to bars, I declined because the conversation would not have been technology as it was (by necessity) in the office, and that would have quickly become uncomfortable.

In other words, sex is social. That’s a concept I want to explore in further depth later on, but for now suffice it to say that for people with a sex drive, an element of social interactions is sexuality, whether they realize it or not.

Another major issue this article touches upon is the fact that there are very few organized bisexual communities in comparison to other sexuality communities, and that the ones that do exist are fairly small. The most striking example of this was that at the last New York City LGBT Pride March, the bisexual contingent had a grand total of four (4!) people marching in it.

Even the BDSM contingent, who typically have one of the smallest groups in the parade (not including the “leather” sections, though I’m still confused as to why BDSM is contained within leather instead of the other way around), always have at least a dozen people or more marching with them. To be fair, I marched with the BDSM group instead of the bisexual group, and therein lies an example of the lack of visibility of the bisexual community.

I think that, by our nature, almost every one of us holds some other label equally important to us as the bisexual label. I am not just bisexual, I’m kinky, too. Most bisexual men I know are not just bisexual, they’re also polyamorous.

As a result of this multi-focal sexuality (”I like this and this…oh, and this too!”), it’s sometimes difficult for bisexual people to be taken seriously. The common argument is that we just haven’t “chosen” yet, but sooner or later, after enough experience and time, we’ll “settle down” into one of the all-or-nothing choices. (This is the same problem switches have in the BDSM scene: “you’re not really a switch, you’re either a top or a bottom and you just don’t know yet.”)

This point of view is no different from hetero-normative thinking, because it is founded on the principles of mutual exclusion. “You can’t be this and that.” Looking at sexuality this way treats such concepts as attraction as though they are finite resources, as if by being attracted to men you can not possibly have enough “spare attraction” to also be attracted to women, or that if you do then the attraction is lessened in direct proportion to how much attraction you have “spent” elsewhere.

I believe people think this way because they are confusing the things that do, in fact, have limited availability, such as time and physical energy, with things that do not, in fact, have any arbitrary limit. Am I the only person to whom confusing these sorts of things sounds absolutely insane?

Moreover, the idea that this insanity also holds true of language is equally absurd:

“There are plenty of lesbians in the gay community who occasionally sleep with men and still call themselves lesbians and vice versa. People need to start being honest in their daily lives about their actual behaviors rather than hiding behind convenient black-and-white labels that breed acceptance from their gay and lesbian peers who often condemn bisexuality.”

In other words, according to Nicole Kristal, who is quoted from the article above and who is a co-author of The Bisexual’s Guide to the Universe, you’re not a lesbian if you’re a woman who also sleeps with men. This is the equivalent of saying “you’re not a woman if you have a penis,” and we already know how ignorant confusing sex with gender identity is.

Ultimately, what this quote spotlights is the importance of understanding language as a tool for communication. The other day, a friend shared an awesome quote from Confucius with me that she read:

When words lose their meaning, people will lose their liberty.

She told me,

I read something today and thought of you immediately. Apparently, Confucius believed that correct usage of words was a prerequisite to working society. When words stopped being connected to specific meanings, he believed that it was a sign of the impending corruption and collapse of civilization. I like that way of looking at it, [but] I had never heard it put that way before.

It is for that reason why academics like Robert Heasley work so hard at providing a vocabulary with which to discuss things like masculinity, and why people like me work so hard at using such vocabularies to define distinctions between things. Doing so hones our understanding of the meanings of words, which fights rhetoric and propaganda in the process. In the war on sex currently being waged, language is the ultimate weapon.

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Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Wednesday Wanderings: Welcome Back and Fond Farewell

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Chastity/Orgasm denial, Communication, Male sexuality, Politics of sex, Professional BDSM, Sexism, Wednesday Wanderings, Writing and blogging

A long time ago, when I was just beginning to explore the sex blog corner of the blogosphere, I decided I’d set myself a task: find a few interesting links every week and publish something nice about them on Wednesdays. Since these were only going to be links I could say something nice about, they would, of course, have to be good links (or at least decent links), because otherwise I would say something bad about them. Yes, my mother did tell me that if I have nothing nice to say, I should not say it at all, and no, I did not usually take her advice.

Well, it’s been a long time, and I don’t know if this is a tradition I can sustain every week. I’m simply not that fast a reader. However, at least every once in a while, because I think the activity of seeking novel quality content is a beneficial one for so many vital reasons—to always question, to always listen, to always be open to new opportunity and possibility—I’ve decided to give this another try and see where it takes me.

I’m also going to forego forcing this tradition to become a search for new sources, because frankly that’s a less pressing goal. This means you might see more of the familiar bloggers showing up here every once in a while. This should be your clue that you should probably subscribe to their blog feeds. ;)

So, this week, I’m going to make special mention of a few blogs that I’ve added to my blog roll, as well as point out a particularly poignant recent post by a blog that is not. (If you’re curious what criteria I use to decide who I list on my blog roll and who I don’t, then you’ll be sad to know that so am I.)

First is Figleaf, of Real Adult Sex, who I’ve been reading for quite some time and linked to on more than one occasion. His posts fill my newsreader with such consistency and frequency that I have completely given up reading every one of them. However, this was really hard to do because each one is just so damn good. In many respects, he belabors the same points over and over again, but he does so on points that are important enough that are always impossible to ignore and, moreover, he does so with novel observations each time. Quite simply, I admire his tenacity and patience, his clarity, and his consistency and commitment to his blog. You can now find him linked from my blog roll.
One blog I don’t keep up with much (simply because it is not personally interesting) is Married Man’s Fucktoy, but this post in which DL’s Toy relates some experiences with orgasm control is decidedly hot. For one, it’s clearly experience and doesn’t read like erotica, which while fun in its own right is sometimes not what you’re looking for. Second, it touches on a few issues that relate to orgasm denial that I am currently grappling with myself, and which I might one day soon write about here. In any event, for the moment, the post is simply a fun romp in which I vicariously experienced a few moments of her covetous desire for an orgasm. Also, it might be a fun glimpse for some male submissives out there to see just how similar orgasm denial can feel for women in some ways as it can feel for us.
Calico, who is pretty much always writing amazing stuff, has done it again for me, this time in a post less than 250 words long. The message? Sex workers teach customers how to talk about what they want. I think we can all agree that’s a good thing.
Another wonderful blogger that I’ve known about for some time but that, for some reason, I simply didn’t start really reading seriously is Chelsea Girl from over on Pretty Dumb Things. Her incredible talent at writing pieces that are at once beautiful and meaningful and thought-provoking have, now that I’ve been listening, given me a lot to consider. For this and other reasons, she’s totally earned a permanent spot on my blog roll.
Finally, another blogger who, evidently, has been blogging for years and years and years and who I only had the pleasure of meeting last week is Debauchette. Debauchette and I met at the most recent sex blogger’s tea hosted by the one and only Blog Mamma, Viviane of The Sex Carnival whose blog is also totally worth a look. She struck me as a surprisingly soft-spoken individual with an obvious abundance of Good Things to say about sex and sexual experience, which is of obvious interest to many of us. I can say the same thing of her writing I’ve read so far.

That’s all for this week. It’s plenty, though, really. As many of you may already be aware, I’m not planning to be in New York City for much longer. This saddens me at the same time as it excites me. I have never in my life met so many intelligent, capable, and enthralling people in this city as I have in the last few months.

Figures, doesn’t it? Just as I get ready to leave, I find that part of what I was looking for elsewhere has been here all along. Sigh. I’ll miss this city and all the new friends and connections I’ve made here. Still, I badly need an adventure—and going to Sydney will be an awfully big adventure.

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Tuesday, December 18, 2007

How an outdated view of masculinity ignores the needs of all men

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Communication, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Femdom, Gender fluidity, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Masochism, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Polyamory, Relationship, Sex, Sexism, Vanilla life

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

As his posts usually do these days, this post of Figleaf’s got me thinking about personal needs, how we provide for those needs, and how those needs become needs in the first place. In it, he says:

Just as we indoctrinate men to strive so mightily to provide that they/we never come home, so we also indoctrinate women so thoroughly to believe men won’t even see them unless they’re starved, then scraped bare, then repainted that some of them/you are afraid to be seen by your partners after a night of roaringly good sex. The real thresholds for being sexy, being a good provider, being a man or a woman, are surprisingly easy to meet. However to embody sexiness, or worthiness, or manliness, or femininity is a fools errand[…]

(His thought-provoking post was inspired by none other than this eloquent post of Calico’s, which is also worth a read. So are the rest of both their blogs, by the way, which each have posts that are almost always equally eloquent.)

Acquiring an accurate understanding of my personal needs has always been the central focus of my life and, sadly, I fear that I still have a long way to go. Having needs that are (or, equally bad, feel as though they are) unfulfilled is the obvious source of a lot of sadness, anger, resentment and jealousy in my life.

When it comes to social and sexual relationships, in fact, jealousy is the word most often associated by most people to indicate a lack of fulfillment of some need in some way. This explains why the polyamorous community and their resources, writings, and issues seem to deal squarely with discovering personal needs and understanding the needs of one’s partners in order to overcome that jealousy.

When reading Figleaf’s observation that men are indoctrinated “to strive so mightily to provide” I saw myself in his words. In most typical instances, what men are indoctrinated to provide is “a living” for their family, which in more concrete terms is often defined by mainstream gender roles as “a dependable source of financial income for the nuclear family unit.” Everyone knows that it’s the man’s job to bring home the bacon, and he’s expected to sacrifice everything—his time, his happiness, his independence, his freedoms, and ultimately himself—in the pursuit of this noble, self-sacrificing, almost holy endeavor.

This is masochism perverted into martyrdom—”no pain, no gain.”

Indeed, there can easily be satisfaction and emotional fulfillment to be found from this goal. I have always absolutely loved to buy Eileen dinner, or treats at Starbucks, or spontaneous gifts—big gifts like several-hundred-dollar jewelry—or to treat the two of us to a night at the movies. All of this all on my dime. I enjoy that because my dime signifies my hard work and spending money on the things that make me happy is something I’ve earned.

Something that makes me happy is providing good experiences to Eileen, which is also the cornerstone of many components of submission. Feeling as though I am capable to provide good experiences for my partner is one thing that is necessary for me to feel submissive. This relationship between being submissive and being a provider and each of their connection to masculinity is most obvious in service-related kinks (sissy-maids and men-turned-”homemakers” are two prime examples that come to mind), and equally obvious in stamina-related kinks (in which men are tortured but, because they are MEN! GRR! they do not whimper or scream and only display a stoic pride), both of which is the (frustratingly) universal representation of male submission everywhere.

Could this be the root of men’s “chivalrous nature”? We are certainly taught that chivalry is a good thing. These activities and the feelings that come from them is both the hegemonic masculine view of how a man should behave towards a woman and an accurate description, at least in parts, of how I want to feel about the way I treat my partners, men and women alike (though the expression of this is, interestingly, different in my relations with men than they are with women).

And that, now that I think about it, may be the first time on this blog in which I have actually described myself as fitting nicely into the masculine gender role stereotype.

Moreover, there’s nothing wrong with this that I can see. Providing for another person makes me happy, and it simultaneously makes me feel strong. Is this not, in fact, the epitome of the knight submissive concept? The knight submissive is a representation of a man who is at once powerful, who uses this power in a way that is courageous, honorable, and makes the lives of those he chooses to effect better, and yet—contrary to the accepted display of hegemonic masculinity—is also submissive to his partner. One might even say he is dominated by his partner, or perhaps in other words that may provide for more insight, is guided, steered, or advised by his partner.

In other words, “behind every good man, there is a good woman.” To me, this sounds as though the knight submissive is the hegemonic masculine man that women read about in romance novels.

Only, because gender stereotypes are idealized versions of atomic characteristics of gender and the masculine gender role has been elected as “the one who provides” whereas the feminine gender role has been elected as “the one who needs,” men are disallowed from needing and women are disallowed from providing—period. End of story.

The classic examples provide evidence of this dichotomy in abundance. What happens if the wife of a heterosexual married couple makes more money than the husband? Suddenly, the husband feels bad because his perceived “manliness” is threatened since she provides more financial income to their family unit than he does. What happens if the wife has a love affair? Again, negative feelings and a perceived threat to his manliness because he is not the one providing her with sexual satisfaction and some other (presumably) man is. This is even true in the way many conservative men respond to vibrators, or, god forbid, pornography intended to be consumed by women.

Any remotely emotionally functional individual will recognize that this system in which women only need and men only provide is harmful to both men and women. Women are expected to need only what men can provide and men are expected not to need anything except, of course, the needs of women. Thanks to the prevailing viewpoint that monogamy is the One True Way to Love® this set of needs is further restricted to include only, for women, the things your one man can provide and, for men, the needs of your one woman.

I see it as self-evident that both men and women have component needs that are irrelevant to their specific partner(s). In other words, a need is intrinsically born of oneself, not of one’s partner. Otherwise, whose need is it, really? Academically, this concept seems as though it can, broadly speaking, be contained within the greater need for self-actualization.

It seems nothing if not utterly ridiculous to function day by day under the rigid and false pretense that only a traditional understanding of the gender model allows. There’s simply no way that I can see being able to squeeze fulfillment and happiness out of being a man whose sole need is to fulfill all his other partner’s needs because, obviously, need-fulfillment is by my earlier definition not actually possible to obtain from a single source. It may, perhaps, be possible and even healthy to seek to fulfill the specific needs of a partner that can be fulfilled by other people, but ultimately there is going to be something, no matter how small that your partner is going to have to do on their own to feel fully fulfilled. (And, if you’ll take a word from the wise, it’s never something that small.)

That piece, no matter how much you or I strive to provide it, being the good, otherwise capable, and self-sacrificing men that we are, is not ever something we can succeed in. Not recognizing that fact leads invariably to codependency of one form or another and then, inevitably, to unhappiness in at least something, be it our work, our social partnerships (of which sexuality and pair-bonding is a form), or—worst of all in my opinion—one’s ability to think effectively and to make good personal choices in one’s private life.

In other words, by focusing so strongly on the experience of our partners, men end up being unable—forbidden, even!—to live our own lives. We need, as a friend said wisely to me the other day, to find a way to disconnect from the experience of our partners, but not disconnect from our partners themselves.

Finding submission with Eileen, for me, has been a major component in being able to connect with another person on a sexual (and thus at least one piece of a social) level that, finally, feels good, and right, and fulfilling. Being submissive meets one of my needs—specifically the need to have fulfilling social interactions. However, in becoming submissive, I must also allow myself the freedom to disconnect from her experience, to allow her the capability to provide for her own needs.

Submission, or masculinity or being a “man”, is not in reality the rigid, narrow thing society tells us being a man is. Being a man is not about providing everything for our partners. It can be about providing for them, but it’s also about providing for ourselves. And guess what? That’s what being a woman is about, too.

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Monday, December 17, 2007

We’re all different: when sex isn’t attractive

Category labels: Altered States and Headspaces, BDSM psychology, Communication, Community, Gender fluidity, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Sex, Sexism

The very awesome thing about knowledge is that it makes things simpler and more complicated at the same time. The more I understand about things, how they work, why they behave the way they do, the less scary and overwhelming things around me become. At the same time, learning something new always makes me feel as though I wish I could tear my attention and consciousness into a dozen different pieces so that I could follow the dozen different trains of thought that have just entered my mind and are thundering past the back of my eyes to a dozen different destinations.

Today, I recognize this almost indescribable sensation as a symptom of racing thoughts, and it’s usually considered a Bad Thing by most psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. I used to call this experience “lightning thinking” because of the way lightning bolts diverge in what looks like an inverted tree structure.

(As a side note and something the linked description of racing thoughts does not make clear, racing thoughts are not indicative of an ability to multitask, and it took me an unfortunately long period of time to discern the distinctions between successful multitasking and wasteful multitasking.)

In the time period between my first experience of racing thoughts and my understanding of the phenomenon, I was completely unaware of the process. This is part of how my brain worked, a part of how I experienced the world and myself, and, well, didn’t everybody? Turns out, no, not everyone knows what racing thoughts feel like. Worse, not everyone is even aware that some people living right now don’t think the way that they do. It’s not just a matter of not thinking about things the way that they do, it’s far more fundamental than that. I literally don’t go about the experience of thinking the same way that other people do.

This might come as a surprise to a lot of people. I mean, it seems so innate, so universal an ability, just to think, to process stimuli that comes from the world we share—the same world. How different can the experience really get? And what’s more, I (usually) act just like you, with no obvious outward indication that my thoughts don’t happen the same way as other people’s do.

Well, that was almost my reaction when I learned about asexuality, which is a sexual orientation that describes people who do not experience sexual attraction. Only I had the benefit of an awareness of diverse sexual experiences (as you might) so the existence of asexuality as a recognized sexual orientation did not come as a huge shock, but rather an intriguing opportunity to learn more about human sexual behavior. “Um, it’s about not feeling sexual attraction,” you might be saying, “how is that supposed to help you understand sexual behavior?” By shining a metaphorical spotlight on distinctions, I’ll respond, by showing differences and providing a basis, if complex, for comparison.

It’s like this: all things that can be understood as something can also be understood as not being something else. A car is not a telephone, and a man is not a woman, right? Right. Only, like colors in a rainbow, there’s more than just two. A car is a motor vehicle, as is a truck and a motorcycle and a van and a motorized scooter and even the “Pope-mobile”. There are gradations of size, fuel efficiency, passenger capacity, weight, and air conditioning options that are probably all at least somewhat different on all the different members of the set of motor vehicles I’ve just described. So, too, must our understanding of other things, like gender and sexual orientation, be.

Why do people continue to insist on rigid and static frameworks that offer, typically, only two ways for a thing to be? The world is too big and too intricate to be described solely by using a single bit for each class of thing.

By and large, pornographers see consumers as either straight or gay men (what about one of those other huge market opportunities, like, I don’t know, women?!), anti-abortion activists see only murder or salvation (making no room for difficult ethical complications like the case of rape), and mental health professionals see only proper or improper functioning (as though that motorized vehicle example applies with a 1-to-1 mapping to the workings of the human mind; it doesn’t).

We need to break away from the obviously inaccurate and hurtful beliefs that restrict our understanding of the world around us. Such beliefs are simply lacking the full intellectual knowledge required to guarantee their truth, and thinking otherwise has proven dangerously arrogant.

In that vein, learning about asexuality brings to light for me an interesting new source of insight on my own sex drive, why it works the way it does, how I might understand and utilize it better, and possibly even other things I have yet to become aware of. I started with this interesting post by Ily from over at asexy beast that reads, in part:

But isn’t being sexual part of being human?

Not necessarily. Sex drive is a bell curve. Just as there are people who are very desiring of sex, there are also people who do not desire it at all. Asexuals are a natural part of the spectrum of sexuality.

Following some links, I found this post by ’shescreamed’ called I’m not crazy, just asexual in the Asexuality Community on LiveJournal which reads:

Does anyone else have this problem?

Today my therapist asked me about my lack of romantic history.
I told her that this is because I have never been attracted to anyone in my entire life, and it’s not my fault, I was born this way.

She said no, you suppress any sexual desire you have and have low self esteem so you feel too insecure to be in a relationship.

I told her I would love to have sexual desire, I just don’t, and it’s not because I’m trying to repress anything.

Does anyone else have the same problem with therapists etc. insisting you have psychological issues and not being able to believe you are the way you are and nothing is wrong with me?

If you replace “lack of romantic history” and its associated references with something from your own life, does this not sound exactly like it could have come directly from you? Maybe you were told that being a sadist was sick, or that being a lesbian just means you haven’t found the right dick yet, or, in my case, that being diagnosed with bipolar disorder meant that my brain was “missing something that medications could give it.”

Obviously, categorically rejecting these possibilities is not in anyone’s best interest but neither is imposing these explanations onto other people. Maybe medications can really help, maybe it’s okay for women not to have any interest in cock, and maybe getting a sexual thrill out of causing another consenting adult some pain is actually a win-win for the sadist and his or her partner. The point is that answers about an individual’s sense of self need to come from that individual; you can’t morally legislate, delegate, or enforce the answers you would prefer people (your brother, your daughter, your friend, your employee…) give you.

Groups of people that share common or similar characteristics are often lumped together into those super-tidy compartments that make it real easy for people who are not accurately described by such characteristics to identify them. As a Jew, I learned a lot about the civil rights movement when I was in school because the oppression of African Americans was an oft-cited example that teachers of my Judaic studies liked to use. Similarly, Ily is finding similarities between asexuals and (of all the kinds!) kinky people:

I’m discovering that asexuals and D/Sers (as the book [Different Loving] calls them) have more in common than I ever thought possible. Even though Aces avoid sex while D/Sers dream up new ways of having it, we’ve both been pegged as vaguely non-human. Aces and D/Sers see straight, purely reproductive sex as nothing to get excited about, and so the more haterific in our midst label both groups “sexual deviants”. Funny, isn’t it?

Both groups suffer from a lack of research and education, and young members often feel freaky and alone. Different Loving also makes a good case for the idea that we all suffer from sexual mores still mired in Victorian-era theories.

Indeed, you really won’t know the extent of the differences people can have until you become aware of the fact that some people really don’t think like you do, which means you don’t think like other people. And, despite what absolutists and fear-mongering conservatives would have you believe, and as our favorite homemaker would say about this kind of diversity, “It’s a Good Thing.”

Friday, December 14, 2007

An Exemplar of Conservative Hypocrisy

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

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

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

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

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

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

In any event, the article continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead of practical advice, what does Grossman offer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But wait, there’s more:

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

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

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

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

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