Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Femquake Fallout: Feminism, the Internet and Boobquake (and Brainquake)

Category labels: Communication, Community, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Sexism, Vanilla life, Writing and blogging

Boobquake was hilarious. Above all else, the joke turned media frenzy turned factional feminist debate taught me that the Internet is like a giant game of telephone. No matter what someone says, someone else will misconstrue it as something totally different.

And y’know what? That’s not so terrible. Here’s why.

The Internet is like a giant game of telephone

While misunderstandings and hurt feelings aren’t fun, they’re not the only thing that can result from a game of telephone. Similarly, while misunderstandings and hurt feelings sadly abound in response to Iranian Cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi’s claim that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes (not to mention Pat Robertson’s equally bigoted claim that gay people cause hurricanes)1, a lot of real good did come from Boobquake. As Lissy observed:

watching my facebook statuses I noticed something… boobquake worked for a lot of people who I know don’t spend much time thinking about feminism at all. My very capable and hardworking sister Ginger, takes no shit from anyone but would never be described as a feminist activist[…]. But boobquake? She was onto that, spewing on her facebook status about sexist pigs in a way that made me a proud older sister… she listened to me ranting, all that time I thought she wasn’t listening as a teenager she was!

Of course, baring cleavage in the name of women’s liberation is itself controversial. In short order, Boobquake received criticism from feminists who felt “saddened” by this response. A counter-event, categorized as a “Protest” on Facebook named Brainquake, soon sprung into being. What’s most interesting of all, Brainquake creators Negar Mottahedeh and Golbarg Bashi say that they’ve been in touch with Boobquake instigator Jennifer McCreight, and McCreight says she’s been in touch with the Brainquake creators, and that there’s little (if any) animosity between the three of them.

Responding to factional feminism

Nevertheless, while hanging out on Twitter on Sunday, I saw a seemingly endless stream of negativity about Boobquake from Brainquake supporters. It was being described as “anti-feminist,” and while I personally don’t find boobquake that appealing (although it is funny), I found the negativity spewed Jennifer’s way even less appealing. That’s when I decided I’d break the binary and came up with Femquake. As I wrote when I introduced the idea:

Both breasts and brains are good for humanity and deserve our respect. Don’t coerce women into being proud of one over the other, or feeling ashamed of either! YES WE CAN all get along.

[…]

The core ideal is not a woman’s body or her mind, but her humanity. Decrying women who are proud of their bodies is as oppressive as forcing the ones who aren’t to cover them up. Hailing intellectualism over physical value is as insensitively demonizing as nonconsensual sexualization.

It’s time for women, men, and everyone else to empower one another to live the lives we want to live, free of coercion and abuse, whether modestly dressed or not.

It’s time for a FEMQUAKE!

Jumping on the “b*quake” bandwagon had its benefits. Within hours, the Femquake Facebook page had hundreds of fans—and an equal number of detractors. It seems that you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. And, statistically speaking, that’s precisely the problem with Boobquake, too, as Phil Plait from Discover Magazine wrote:

there are very few huge quakes, and a lot of little ones. We expect to rack up maybe one quake more powerful than magnitude 8 in a year, but on average we get one in the magnitude 6 – 6.9 range every couple of days somewhere in the world, and one in the 5 – 5.9 range something like three to five times every day. That’s every few hours!

And there’s the weakness in the Boobquake plan. […W]ithout defining the time period, the earthquake size, and the region in advance, this can actually reinforce the cleric’s claims! Given the huge tracts of land involved, no matter when women of the world unveil their decolletage, there is bound to be a magnitude 5 quake within an hour or so of the event, and a mag 6 quake within a day.

Jennifer McCreight, Negar Mottahedeh and Golbarg Bashi, and myself have all received criticism for supporting gender justice in our own ways, and the criticism is as diverse as ever. That’s no surprise, and again, I think it’s actually a beautiful thing. Having this diversity empowers people to choose the form of activism that’s right for them.

And if you don’t see what you like, you can self-empower yourself to go make it.

Feminism is about gender equality, and equality requires self-empowerment

That message of self-empowerment is, in my view, what my response to the factionalism over the “*quake” events is all about: Don’t let ideological feminists shame you into covering yourself up, or pressure you into exposing yourself, I wrote. Your body is YOURS. It is yours to show off however you like, whether physically, intellectually, or otherwise.

On that note, let me share with you some of the criticism I’ve received over Femquake. I think the negativity can be illustrative and can offer a wonderful opportunity to practice empowering positivity. If all this hullaballoo over boobquake has shown me one thing, it’s that we all need to practice assuming good faith and responding to offense nonviolenty.

@Custard_Socks says “fuck off with your titpics”

I followed conversation about #Femquake on Twitter. Here’s what @Custard_Socks had to say:

Femquake? Brains and boobs? My sister’s a flat chested idiot but she’s done damn well in a male dominated job, so fuck off with your titpics

(They said it here.)

I responded:

@Custard_Socks #Femquake is feminist solidarity—the idea is that #sexuality is too often divisive. Why be so negative when we could empower?

In answering honestly (I believe), @Custard_Socks said:

@maymaym From the participants on the Femquake Facebook page, feminism means you can brag about your high IQ & big tits. Solidarity, my arse

@maymaym Boasting is empowerment for the selfish.

(They said it here and here.)

At this point, it occurred to me that there probably wasn’t anything I could say to convince this person of Femquake’s intent. I simply don’t know how else to describe Femquake than the way I did on the Femquake Facebook event page:

On Femquake Day, honor a feminist who inspires compassion among different groups of people and who celebrates the value inherent in the diversity of human sexuality. In other words, HONOR FEMINISTS WHO ROCK YOUR WORLD!

Or, just smile at a stranger. It’s good for them, for you, and for our planet. :)

If honoring feminists who rock my world amounts to “brag[gin]” about their high IQ and big tits, well, fuck, I’m in! If smiling at strangers is “boasting” and “selfish,” fuck it, slap my ass and call me narcissistic! Smiling is healthy, and so is being proud of who you are.

Anyway, taking my own advice, my conversation with @Custard_Socks continued with my reply, which I intended just as genuinely as I believe they intended their earlier reply to me:

@Custard_Socks :) I hope you have a fantastic day today and brighten someone’s day. It’d be wonderful if you were able to do that.

But a moment of insight hit me when @Custard_Socks answered back with, @maymaym Are you saying I’m more than likely not capable of that?

“Oh,” I thought to myself, “is that the concern?” Does @Custard_Socks feel so disempowered to bring joy to others that they are so ready to jump to the false belief that others find them incapable of it? Obviously, only @Custard_Socks can answer that, but regardless of this person’s situation, it occurred to me that countless people probably do feel exactly that.

Maybe some of what the knee-jerk negativity in feminist debates needs is someone to say, “Hey, I support you, and I think you can bring this world joy!” (You can read the rest of my conversation with @Custard_Socks here, here, and here.)

Melliferax says, “someone else who is ostensibly on the same side has to go off whining about it? Grumble.”

Femquake got blogged about right alongside Boobquake and Brainquake, just as I’d hoped it would. Of course, not everyone was so enthused. In a comment on one such blog post, Melliferax said:

Femquake… had a very quick look and it just seems like the usual call for equality? How’s that different from, y’know, feminism or good ole humanism? Why is it that every time someone comes up with an idea, like arresting the pope or showing some cleavage, someone else who is ostensibly on the same side has to go off whining about it? Grumble.

Femquake was born out of my unhappiness with the unhappiness many Brainquakers felt towards Boobquakers. So yeah, I guess you could say I was “whining about it.” But is that so terrible?

I mean, if a “call for equality” can come from unhappiness, is saying that the people who advocate for that equality are “whining” really going to help matters? I don’t think so, but I’m not going to belittle you for thinking differently.

If calls for equality stem from whining, then maybe what we need are more people whining! What I think we don’t need, however, is negativity directed at calls for equality. Since you get to choose how you respond, why choose something negative when you could choose something positively empowering?

Millerax says that Femquake “just seems like the usual call for equality,” but as the billions of female-assigned, intersex, transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual, kinky, and queer people will attest, calls for equality is anything but “usual” in far too many parts of the world. I think the absence of more calls to equality in places like Iran is seriously whacked, yo. Don’t you?

Anonymous says, “awesome. a man is leading the femquake charge. […I]t means a little less to me now.”

As I’ve been saying for years, one of the beautiful things about the Internet is that it enables us to let our ideas, words, and actions speak for themselves, without judgements based on age, race, gender, or other characteristics. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a insert-your-feared-identity-here. However, identity really matters to some people.

In a comment on Feminist Mom in Montreal’s Femquake blog post, someone who prefers to remain anonymous said:

awesome. a man is leading the femquake charge. That’s all great and lovely, but I guess I was hoping that it was a woman. If that makes me sexist, well, I guess maybe I am.

Not gonna lie, it means a little less to me now.

The point is still there and the point is a good one, but meh…some dude on the internet leading the charge on us uniting our boobs and our brains is just, IDK, ironic.

Thanks for the help, though.

First, Anonymous, you’re very welcome! :D I’m glad to help bring about a world where gender justice is a reality!

That being said, I have to wonder why my being a man means that Femquake loses some measure of respect in your eyes. As a man, I know that it’s very difficult for men—including myself, at times—to stand up for the rights of women. Y’see, I could choose not to. I could go about my life content in the knowledge that because no one questions me when I check “M” when replying to Facebook’s “Gender” question,2 I have privileges that someone who checks “F” may never have.

And y’know what? That’s a pretty sweet deal for me and the other “M”‘s, and a pretty crappy one for all the “F”‘s.

That’s why it’s absolutely baffling to me that when men stand up for gender equality, it somehow means less than when women do it. The reality is that no matter who is standing up for gender equality, it means the same thing: that we are all working towards the same goal of equality and opportunity for all souls on this planet, regardless of what body those souls inhabit.

So, while Anonymous may find it “ironic” that a man like me came up with Femquake, I find it equally ironic that someone who wants to support gender equality would devalue an effort to support gender justice due to the gender of that effort’s founder.

Strengthen love, not shame

There are, of course, plenty of other negative and positive responses to Femquake, and I’m thrilled to see that the Femquake page is still getting fans. After all, communication is inherently imperfect because otherwise we wouldn’t need it. And so I think, in the end, all this diversity is beautiful—it’s a reflection of the diversity inherent in all of you!

Ultimately, regardless of whether someone supports me or tries to put me down, I’m going to work on just being happy. I want to spread joy in the world. :) I know it can be hard, and I struggle to smile sometimes but, with your help, I’m learning how.

Thank you for all the criticism, the support, the encouragement, the denigration, and responses. Thank you for keeping the conversation going, and for talking to one another, and to me! Thank you for turning a sexist comment by an Iranian religious leader and a boob joke by a young feminist into an opportunity to promote peace and happiness and understanding and unity and self-empowerment and beauty and intelligence!

Now go and enjoy life, because working towards bringing pleasure and joy and equality and opportunity to everyone—everyone—is what feminism is all about!

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
  1. I think Pat is wrong about the whole hurricane thing. I think Teh Gehys actually cause volcanos. Don’t you remember the recent Icelandic volcano that halted air travel in Europe? I mean, those Frenchies are all sexual deviants! I say we need a #Gaycano experiment! Go, Internet, go! [↩]
  2. Facebook really ought to change that label to “Sex,” not “Gender,” since those two words are not actually interchangeable. See also: Gender and Technology. [↩]

Tagged with: , ,

Comments (16)

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Orgasm Denial Does Not Submissive Men Make

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Chastity/Orgasm denial, Communication, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Myths and misconceptions, Sex, Sexism

This interesting image via SlaveBoy.Tumblr.com.

One of the things that has seriously bugged me for a very long time is how lots of people think about submissiveness, particularly but not necessarily as it relates to male sexuality. It bugs me because for all the lip service paid to respecting submission, very little about the way it’s discussed actually seems to be respectful of submissive desires.

I, unlike many submissive young men in their teens, surrounded myself with the culture and ritual of dominant/submissive relationships through the very fortunate circumstances in which I found myself. Yet, despite my incredible access to such resources, it was indescribably difficult (not to mention painful) for me to get to a point where I felt like I can enjoy my sexual submission as a valid part of my masculinity.

Why was it so hard for to me feel validated in my submission? Why does it continue to be a struggle for many people, as the overwhelming response to my subversive writings at MaleSubmissionArt.com show? This question, at once both simple and unspeakably intricate, is what I want to address in this post.

Imagine for a moment you’re a young guy (or a guy of any age, really) trying to understand your sexual desires. You know you want a relationship with (in the name of simplicity) a woman who will “take charge in the bedroom,” but you don’t really know what that looks like. You come across porn and sex blogs and, like a second (or third, or fourth) erotic awakening, all sorts of fantasy imagery involving either getting butt-fucked or not being allowed to orgasm, or both of those, starts bubbling in your brain, since—let’s face it—that’s most of the erotic material out there for such guys. You finally get a girlfriend and, remarkably, she’s good, giving and game, so you get butt-fucked and she doesn’t let you come. “Wonderful,” you’re likely to think, “now I’ve been submissive.”

If you’re lucky, maybe it was really wonderful. More power to you. But what if it’s not? Moreover, and I suspect this is most common, what if that wonderfulness is just the tip of the iceberg? What if the new experience was amazing and novel but you want more? What is that “more” that you want? More butt-fucking? More bondage? More sexual service? More orgasm denial? What are you yearning for, really?

This, sadly, is where many of us get stuck. I’ve read countless words from hundreds if not thousands of men, all of whom seem to be trying to answer these very questions. I’m one of these men, trying to figure out what the fuck all this desiring is, trying to make it “more” and “better” as though I’m following some kind of primal programming. I want to be more passionate. More intimate. More connected. More devoted. More focused. More meaningful. More submissive.

Obviously, this is a very big topic, and I often feel overwhelmed just thinking about how submission relates to my life, influences my relationships, or shapes my desires. As I often struggle with articulating these thoughts, I figured that even if I don’t get it quite right, it’s worth sharing some of where I’ve gotten to because I no longer enjoy sex despite being a submissive man. I finally enjoy sex because I am—and want to be—a sexually submissive man.

Hopefully, I’ll clarify the imprecise language we currently have available to explore gendered power and submissive masculinity in particular, and I’ll address how such feeble language may cause egregious ambiguity in communication as well as misconceptions about fundamental desires that hamper our understanding of consensual sexual submission.

Hot or not? Submission isn’t arousal.

This submission stuff is hard, and I’m not the only one who’s struggled, or is struggling, with it. One reason it’s so goddamn hard is because the way I so often see it conceptualized feels polluted by imprecision, absolutism, and sexism.

Most of the time, I ignore a great deal of the polluted chatter because it comes from people I don’t hold in high regard to begin with. Recently, however, some of the men who blog that I respect a lot have hit some of the same notes while singing submissive masculinity’s tunes as the people I ignore, and that is something I cannot ignore.

More specifically, Thumper, whose blog I read almost religiously, inspired a debate between MyKey and myself. In a comment on one of Thumper’s posts, MyKey said:

The denial after [lots of orgasms] is much harder and much sweeter for it, and the submission deeper and more fun. Of course during those periods [after orgasm] its hard to be as submissive[…].

Although I’ve read this opinion expressed in about a bazillion different ways, it’s a sentiment I’ve never felt completely comfortable with. Indeed, the more I dissect my own submissiveness and explore what submission means to me, the more upset I get by its prevalence. I get even more upset when bloggers perpetuate this, because they are currently the most influential source of education about submissive masculinity.

But before I get too far into what I find so upsetting about the way this is framed, let’s make one thing clear: what I’m about to say has nothing to do with espousing a submissive ideology, a One True Way® for being a “real submissive.” It’s irrational to, for instance, call a self-identified switch “a submissive” when that person is feeling submissive by sole virtue of their feelings; they are no more or less “a submissive” than they say they are, despite how desirous of submissive feelings they are at any given time. Insofar as identity politics are involved, they stop at the point of acknowledging that your identity is a part in your personal experience of the world.

This post, however, is not about your experience of the world. It’s about finding a way to convey your experience in a manner that is reconcilable with the different experiences of others. This is important because, lacking this ability, all conversation about submission starts with “for me,” repeats the caveat, and then ends with “Your Mileage May Vary.” To date, every way I’ve heard anyone talk about submission breaks down when someone else introduces their own, differing, experience, and I’m afraid those conversations are no longer useful for me.

Anyway, the short debate between MyKey and I ultimately lead to a post in which Thumper put forth the following equation:

Denial + arousal = submission.

In the comments—worth reading despite veering into predictably unhelpful tangents at points—Thumper later amended this to read Denial + arousal = submissive energy. That’s better, thanks in part to the focus on “energy” (I think more precisely termed desire) over the intrinsic nature of the outcome. Nevertheless, I want to challenge both statements because I think the premise underlying them is simply not true.

Both statements feed into a dangerous, wide-spread stereotype: the cock-centric notion that if you control a man’s penis, you control the man. Is that true? Of course it’s not. These activities could certainly be an expression of dominance or submission and they might trigger dominant or submissive feelings in oneself or one’s partner(s), but Thumper, MyKey and I already seem to agree that the acts are not, themselves, the root cause of submission or dominance.

To wit, and to Thumper’s credit, one of his next sentences is the following:

That’s not saying I’m in no way submissive when my sexual appetite has been totally sated. I think I would be accepting of domination even then. [And later, in the comments:] I wasn’t trying to suggest it’s just that simple […] but they are strongly related.

Indeed, I can think of no realm less suited to the beautiful simplicity of mathematics than human desire, so it’s obvious that Thumper’s equation is an oversimplification. Since we can all see that things are not “just that simple,” I presume that what Thumper, MyKey, and other submissive men perpetuating this simplistic formulation are trying to get at is that they feel submissive more acutely when the fact of their orgasm denial is at the fore of their thoughts. Thumper says he feels his “sub mojo” lessen after he has come. MyKey calls this sensation “sub drop” and, since I disagree with the premise of their statements, questions whether I’m “wired differently”.

At least in this regard, however, I am not wired differently. I do understand the sudden, often startling change in desires post-orgasm. During relationships with keyholders, the degree with which my interest in, say, getting my penis locked away waned after having an orgasm was (and still is) totally remarkable to me. Nevertheless, similar to the experiences of others, when my keyholder wanted me locked, I got locked. Why? Because that’s hot! It wasn’t quite as hot right then, but it was super-hot shortly thereafter, when I was once again unable to masturbate freely.

This simple after-the-fact observation points to a crucial distinction I fear is missing from the conversation about submission: just because an activity is less pleasant at some moments than it is during others doesn’t mean I won’t do or enjoy those activities. Moreover, the drive to perform those activities independent of one’s immediate motivations is a distinct, separate pleasure, from the pleasure one gets from desiring the activity directly.

I think Tom Allen illustrated this in the sexiest way ever in his erotic story, Ahead of Time. Portions of this story are so apropos to this discussion that I just have to quote it:

“And I want you to come really hard for me. I want you to remember this for a long time.”

“Oooh,” I moaned aloud.

“That’s why I’m going to make you eat my pussy right after you come.”

I gasped. It was like an electric shock to my groin. I’ve long had this fantasy, but could never bring myself to do it. The idea of being forced to clean her, to lick my still-hot come from her, to hear her demanding that I make her clean, to make her come with my tongue… I’ve only mentioned to her a handful of times over the years, but I’ve never been able to ask for this, let alone to try it. She was right, there’s something about the first ten or fifteen minutes after coming that puts all that desire right out of my head. I was excited, but at the same time a bit fearful. I knew that I wouldn’t want to do it afterward…and so did she.

She sensed my hesitation. “I know the idea turns you on,” she said.

Thinking fast, I said “But, I, um, thought that you were satisfied. You told me that you had come enough for tonight.”

“Oh, you’re not going to do it for my pleasure,” she said, “at least, not for my sexual pleasure. You’re going to do it because in a few days, you’re going to think about it, and you’re going to remember this evening as the hottest thing we’ve ever done.”

[…]

I was still partially dazed as she inched her knees alongside my body. When she finally rested her legs over my arms and braced her other hand against the headboard, though, things…changed somehow. Her pussy, which just minutes ago was a beautiful, warm cave, suddenly now seemed like a hairy tube of flesh that was filled with something that I didn’t want. Ugh, how could I ever have asked for this? I pursed my lips, but it was too late—I felt the drips onto my cheeks and chin. Seconds later, her slick lips were pressed tightly against my mouth, and I could hear her encouraging me to clean her, to keep sucking and licking until everything was gone.

(Emphasis mine.)

What Tom’s story and our many similar experiences show us is that not even the men who purport to quantify submission based on sexual arousal or orgasm denial actually do that. Although our awareness of submissive feelings may be intensified by specific, often fetishistic triggers (e.g., being horny and prevented from coming), those two concepts are not causally related.

For men like Thumper and I, who clearly dig orgasm denial pretty hard, it makes sense that this desire is a core aspect of how we want to fuck. But we do ourselves and our readers a terrible disservice by perpetuating the idea that our fetish is the cause of our submissive desire rather than a manifestation of it. Submission does not come about through someone else’s control—that is mere restriction in the best case, and abuse in the worst case—it comes about through our active desire to submit. Consensual submission is not about how someone else controls me, it’s about the opportunities I create for myself to be vulnerable to that person.

When I hear people discussing submission as though it is the result of the thing they want instead of discussing submission itself as the thing they want, it’s like listening to people talk while putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Such an awkward conceptualization of submission is not merely incorrect, it’s very dangerous because it restricts any submissive desire into a necessarily coercive paradigm.

In this instance, with teasing and denial as the addends, it constructs mens’ submission as totally dependent on the myth of male lust (the idea that men are controlled by their penises because they are men). It states that submissive energy is itself induced by a woman (or, more generally, “keyholder”) by accessing that man’s sexual potency in a strictly prescribed, time-release fashion, like a pill.

This is the same misconception that says blowjobs are inherently submissive, or that pain is inherently bad, or even that blogging about sex is inherently submissive (srsly)! Sadly, these ideas are the prevailing view of what “submission” is, and I think they totally miss the point about the validity of submission itself as a core motivation.

Framing submission as a second-class thing, a byproduct of some other, first-class particle, is incorrect. Submission is it’s own distinct facet of sexual desire.

Reductionist Submission Is Dangerous To Your Sex Life

There’s absolutely nothing wrong about getting off on stereotypes. While the reasons for why many submissive men, including myself, fetishize orgasm denial are debatable, that obvious fact does not make orgasm denial a component of submission. Akin to the way desiring anal sex does not make someone gay, abstaining from orgasm does not make someone a submissive. Abstaining longer doesn’t make them “more submissive.”

Sexual “teasing” is really pleasurable and fun for many people, regardless of their interest in submission. For a huge population, that kind of sex is all about improving their orgasms, whether “vanilla” or not; I’ve read of self-identified dominant men who enjoy the practice, too. For other people, like certain religious sects, some portions of asexual populations, and anorgasmic women, living (or trying to live) an orgasm-less existence isn’t even kinky. On the flip side, there are certainly some submissive men who simply aren’t into orgasm denial at all.

In other words, even though sex acts obviously influence one’s mental or physical state at any given moment, conceptually coupling a sexual activity to what an activity means is going to cut you off from the pleasure of diverse sexual experience. Teasing and denial (the “denial+arousal” part of Thumper’s equation) are not ingredients for submission, they’re just toys I play with because I, like many others, enjoy expressing submission with them some of the time. Sometimes we enjoy it more than other times, but sometimes we express that same submission in completely unrelated ways.

Regardless of your personal experience, I’d urge you to avoid linking any sex act to any intention, even “for you,” even if it’s your fetish. The stereotypical view of orgasm denial as requisite for or even directly “enhancing” submission, even for those of us who fetishize it, simply doesn’t account for our own diverse expressions of submission. To assert that it does is fundamentally miscommunicative. It’d be like saying getting flogged is submission and that the harder you get flogged the more submissive you are, and although people often make the “harder=submissivier” false assertion as well, that doesn’t make it sensible, that makes it dangerous!

That definition of submission, coercive at best and abusive at worst, invalidates submission itself as a potential motivation for healthy sex by undermining a submissive person’s power to choose exactly what they do or do not want—a power that’s required to make healthy sexual choices for one’s self, even “as a submissive.” It tricks us into believing all the false dichotomies embedded in hegemonic culture that tell us BDSM is obscene, and that to be submissive is to necessarily be unassertive, passive, self-effacing, receptive, or acquiescent. These are not ambiguous, wishy-washy obstacles to people’s health. For many people, particularly men who are deeply immersed in heteronormative culture, these are real factors that contribute to sexual anxiety and a horrible depreciation of self-image.

Defining the degree of one’s sexual submission as the summation of a period of orgasm denial and current sexual arousal is not only reductionist, I believe it’s actively damaging. The equation perpetuates the myth of male lust and disavows the validity of submission as a sexual self-expression that can be actively chosen, rather than induced coercively.

In the post that spawned all this theorizing, Thumper wrote:

I had cruised all through my adolescence with no inkling I was what I was (though I can see some signs that were there all along).

Like Thumper, I was certainly submissive before I had a dominant partner in my life. So while this rant may sound like meaningless semantics to some, it’s crucial that we amplify these distinctions and move the prevailing understanding of submissive masculinity away from the limiting, misrepresentative, and downright sexist bullshit so often spewed by exploitative pro-dommes and the likes of Elise Sutton (no link because I hate what she says; Google it instead actually, Gloria Brame’s essay on Elise Sutton is totally worth reading). That’s precisely the kind of bullshit that kept “what we are” hidden from men like Thumper and I for so long.

As an adamantly submissive man myself, I’m sure my personal experience is going to be different from, say, a switch’s orgasm denial experience. And that’s the point: submission is not about creating a ruleset of Things To Do To Be Submissive for anyone, yourself least of all. Very simply, it’s about sexual self-expression in order to be happy and healthy.

So please, all of us who blog about such things, stop insisting that keeping a man from his orgasms somehow turns him more submissive. You’re just fooling yourselves, your readers, and arguably worst of all, your lovers.

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (26)

Monday, February 8, 2010

On Dichotomies that (No Longer) Jail Me – KinkForAll Providence

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Communication, D/s dynamics, Kink events, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Myths and misconceptions, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Vanilla life

This past Saturday, KinkForAll Providence was hosted at Brown University and sponsored by the Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council (SHEEC), chaired by undergraduate student Aida Manduley. I had an awesome time. The unconference sparked fantastically interesting and very important conversations, including discussions about the approach different cultures have to sex and sexuality (notably traditional Mexican and Puerto Rican culture), how people with otherwise “alternative” views can fit into and become personally empowered within a larger mainstream that they are often swimming against, and many more things.

Best of all, these conversations didn’t just stay within the four walls of our venue among the participants who attended physically, but it also reached out across the Internet thanks to the KinkForAll Providence live video stream, Twitter conversations, and KFAPVD liveblogs. I think the event’s use of the Internet was truly remarkable this time, because we were able to literally invite anyone in the world to literally watch and see and participate in the discussions that we were having, even if they were unable to be physically present, and even if not everyone agreed with what was being said all the time. Most importantly, as I said in my presentation, since we were able to inspire conversation, everyone stayed within the realm of constructive discourse, and that means we were able to create knowledge, even while individuals may have disagreed on some points.

Below is a video of my presentation. As usual, my presentation is “open source” and Creative Commons licensed. Feel free to download it, use it yourself, or share it with anyone you think might find it valuable. If you do, I would greatly appreciate a link back to this page.

On Dichotomies that (No Longer) Jail Me – KinkForAll Providence from maymay on Vimeo.

Download:

I am deeply grateful to Emma for helping me with this presentation and also for taking a leading role in unorganizing KinkForAll Providence (so I didn’t actually do so much this time—and I think that’s great!). Similarly, I’m also grateful to Aida Manduley for getting this event sponsored by SHEEC and for being the primary unorganizer for venue-related issues. There were some, but she handled them beautifully and deserves more praise for more reasons than many of you know. Their persistence, professionalism, thoroughness, and ardent support of sexual freedom, freedom of speech, and students’ rights were what made this event possible, even in the face of some very harsh and alarmist criticism.

With that thanks in mind, here’s the entirety of the presentation I gave at KinkForAll Providence as a text transcript:

First of all, let me just say that this is amazing. Look at all of us here at the fifth KinkForAll unconference in the first year of KinkForAll unconferences! KinkForAll Providence is now the 5th KinkForAll event being held in the 1-year history of the event’s conception. That’s one KinkForAll, in 4 different cities so far, about every 2 months or so for a whole year! Wow!

This event is thanks in large part to the amazing work of two women: Emma Gross, and Aida Manduley, who’s Chair of the Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council here at Brown University. They’re responsible for getting us this space and so much more. Let’s give them a huge hand! (APPLAUSE) I like that name: Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council. Health, education, and empowerment.

I like that name because I think we are actually taught, from a very young age, to see the world in dichotomies, a set of things that are exclusive from an opposing set of things. Dichotomies are necessarily polarizing and, if you’re not careful, they can be paralyzing. Indeed, dichotomies can be DISempowering.

Self-empowerment relies upon our ability to recognize existing dichotomies so that we can utilize them and, if necessary, so that we can break out of them. As Stephen R. Covey, author of the best-selling “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” reminds us:

Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.

Dichotomies are genuinely useful, even necessary. We use them all the time to make sense of the world around us. In fact, dichotomies themselves conveniently come in two mutually exclusive varieties! These are: true dichotomies, and false dichotomies.

Unfortunately, many of the dichotomies that contemporary culture teaches us are one kind are actually the other! Specifically, many dichotomies that you might’ve thought were true are actually false! According to Wiktionary, the Wikipedia-like dictionary, a false dichotomy, just so that we’re all on the same page, is:

A situation in which two alternative points of views are presented as the only options, whereas others are available.

How many of the dichotomies that hegemonic culture says are “true” do you think are actually false? I think the answer might surprise you, and that’s what I’m hoping to do in this presentation: I want to help you recognize these dichotomies. In fact, that’s what the entire founding concept behind KinkForAll is about!

KinkForAll’s tag line is:

A serendipitous, ad-hoc unconference about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life.

This idea, that sexuality can intersect with all the other things in our lives, seems to be something that a lot of people are really uncomfortable with. Their discomfort highlights several dichotomies, one of which is this one:

  • Obscene vs Decent

As it happens, this is one of the many false dichotomies that are societally constructed. How do we know that? Easy! Not everyone is uncomfortable with sexuality intersecting certain aspects of their lives, and some people are only uncomfortable with it intersecting with some parts of their lives, but not with others. This variability is the signature of all false dichotomies. Remember that!

Just to drive the point home, let me tell you a short story. Once upon a time (okay, actually in 1966), in a land far, far away (okay, actually in Kristiansand, Norway), lived a man by the name of Jens Bjørnboe. Jens was a painter and a school teacher, but more than anything else, he was a writer. Jens loved to write, and had already published a book of deeply religious poetry, Poems (Dikt, 1951), and a book that dealt with shortcomings of the school system, Jonas (1955).

Then, Jens wrote a fictional novel about an 18 year old girl named “Lillian” who had to masturbate to have orgasms, called Without a Stitch. According to one review:

Without a Stitch begins with a bit of girl-on-girl frolicking with Lillian and Brita [Lillian's classmate], as well as Lillian’s attempts at having fun with the inexperienced Henry. She can’t get the desired satisfaction when Henry fumbles around, and in reaction becomes a real cock-tease — and eventually she realises she needs some professional help. Thank god Brita refers her to Dr. Peterson.

Now, Dr. Peterson is, “a specialist in the orgasm” and Lillian entrusts herself into his care, with all the desired results. Nice. :) The review continues,

Lillian’s problem seems to be that she worries about what her mother and grandmother might think, causing these inhibitions that hold her back. But Dr. Peterson helps her overcome these, and instructs her in his own moral code — which amounts to that all sex is good (and more is apparently better …), as long as no one is hurt or taken advantage of. It takes a lot of daily sessions — during which she’s not allowed to be with any other man — to get the message across, but finally she’s cured.

All right, so: a woman of legal adulthood who was so concerned about what others might think of her that she can’t have orgasms overcomes that fear under the care of a physician who tells her that all sex is good as long as no one is hurt or taken advantage of. Okay, so there’s some lesbian scenes, but also some really strict monogamy. Doesn’t sound so out-there radical to me, really.

Unfortunately for Jens, it did sound radical to the government of Norway, and Bjørnboe suffered an obscenity conviction for publishing the book as pornography. Interestingly, his fictional porn would arguably pale in comparison to the non-fiction writing I’ve published on my own blog—and that I’ve read from countless other bloggers! Obviously then, we are obscene by some standards but not by others. Indeed, obscenity standards vary with time, place, and a host of other things.

More interestingly, perhaps, is the fact that Jens Bjørnboe went on to publish his most well-known work, The History of Bestiality, and as far as I can tell the Norwegian government didn’t care to prosecute him for publishing pornography in that case. Huh.

Jens was a pretty uncompromising man. He once said,

People speak of ‘sexual morality,’ but that is a misleading expression. There is no special morality for sex. No matter what you do with yourself, whether you go to bed with girls or with boys, and no matter what it occurs to you to do with them or with yourself, no moral rule applies to that sphere of activity other than the principles that govern every aspect of life: honesty, courage, common humanity, consideration.

What Jens understood that I think is so valuable is that people who dichotomize consensual sexual activity into obscene and decent acts also tend to approach morality as a dichotomy; they couple obscene with immoral and decent with moral. Indeed, Jens sees that the failure to recognize one false dichotomy actually blurs one’s view of which other dichotomies are true and which are not. On the other hand, when you begin to see the gradations between things you once simplistically believed were absolutes, you empower yourself to break out of all false dichotomies.

Now, before I go any further, it’s important to mention that false dichotomies are not inherently bad things; they can be useful, as I mentioned, and they can be a lot of fun. Case in point, I think dichotomies of power are really fucking sexy! Specifically, I have always loved (and still love) playing—but not being—powerless. That is, I enjoy being sexually submissive.

Trouble is, I’m a man. Yes, I know what you’re thinking: DUH! Thing is, the fact that I’m a man wasn’t always clear to me. In fact, thanks to this really strong tendency that false dichotomies, when we incorrectly believe they are true, have of reinforcing one another, for the longest time I thought I was actually a woman! Yeah! Let me tell you why.

In mainstream Western society, and indeed in most modern cultures, this dichotomy of power–dominance on one hand and submission on the other–reinforces this other, totally unrelated anywhere but in some people’s minds, false dichotomy: the one of gender, with men on one side, and women on the other. And then, as if that weren’t enough, both of those false dichotomies are also strung together like this, so that dominance and manliness is also coupled with activity, while submission and femininity is also coupled with passivity. The trouble with that, for me, was that I like being active and I like being passive in bed!

And then, as if that weren’t enough, I turned 13, and I put a toothbrush in my butt–and I liked it! So now I discovered this other, additional incorrect coupling: penetration is coupled with being active, which, as we’ve already seen is coupled with manliness, which ostensibly makes it dominant. On the other side, being penetrated is coupled with being passive or “receptive,” which, remember, is coupled with womanliness, which makes it ostensibly submissive. So now my 13 year old self is totally fucking confused and has no idea what the fuck I am–man, woman, top, bottom, active partner, passive partner–except that I knew I really liked getting tied up and I really like my toothbrush in my butt.

But wait, there’s more! One year later, my younger brother made friends with this really cute guy in his class and he started coming over to our place and I got a really big crush on him. And that’s when I learned that contemporary culture said, if I was, in fact, a boy, that I was also gay! Yeah, even though I also also masturbated to thoughts of girls! Because apparently, to fit in with contemporary culture, you can’t be bisexual if you’re a man. You’ve gotta be either straight or gay. And even though I was “only” 14, I knew that if you like your toothbrush in your butt, you’re gay!

So, like, oh my god! Could I be a gay boy who liked girls? Was that possible? Was I just…wrong about everything? Fuck, was there something wrong with me? Maybe there was something wrong with these distinctions. Maybe not all of them were true dichotomies. Hmm….

Thankfully, I had (drum roll please) THE INTERNET! Yes, the Internet. I did some searches. I surfed a bunch of sites. I read a lot of porn. I had some more pretty confused orgasms. And then, I found this: The Kinsey Scale.

What was so interesting about the Kinsey scale was that it introduced me to this idea that there were gradations in sexual orientation. That’s when it clicked: I’m probably some kind of bisexual. So, ignoring for a moment the limitations of this concept, I figured that if there were gradations in sexual orientation, maybe there were gradations in a bunch of those other dichotomies.

Of course, it turns out, yes, there are. There’s a big wide world of queer between the poles of heteronormativity, switches enjoy varying consensual sexual power differentials, and even when it comes to anatomical characteristics there are varying degrees of intersexuality that mix male and female. So, long story short, even though I really liked that toothbrush, I eventually upgraded to a strap-on because I knew that one’s gender identity, such as man or woman, and the enjoyment one gets from a particular sexual activity, such as penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse or receptive buttsex, are in no way directly correlated.

Sure, sometimes I want penetration to be about power, but it never had to be anymore, because now I had the freedom, and the power to decide how anything outside of me would affect me. I found that the better I got at decoupling an activity from a preconceived notion of what it means, the more fun sex became. And even when I do choose to get penetrated submissively, it always has to be about good sex first and foremost, not about some misguided morality or sexist system of beliefs.

Okay, I know this is a talk at a conference about sexuality, but let’s return for a moment to KinkForAll’s tagline:

A serendipitous, ad-hoc unconference about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life.

What about the rest of life? Are dichotomies there, too? You betcha! Here’s an obvious one:

  • Black vs. White (or, more generally, race)

And here’s how we know that’s a false dichotomy:

  • Barack Obama
  • halle berry, jordan sparks, tony parker, derek jeter, tyson beckford (he’s jamaican and chinese), slash (the drummer from guns n roses), lisa wu hartwell

Here’s a not-so-obvious dichotomy, but one I bet most people who came to see me speak had to think about at least a little bit before they came here:

  • Public / private –> Out / closeted

For those that don’t know, when Sara Eileen and I co-founded KinkForAll, we took some very heavy criticism from people who believed that the essentially open and public nature of KinkForAll events were “recklessly endangering” participants, that we would be “outing” people. I believe this criticism was spawned from a belief in that false dichotomy: that to be public is to be out, that in order to have adequate privacy, people of sexuality minorities must be closeted.

That falsehood needlessly segregates sexuality apart from the rest of our lives. In reality, no one is ever completely in the closet or out of it. You might be out about some things to some people, but not out to others. By coming to KinkForAll events, people are forced to grapple with the reality that the closet is not a binary.

Here’s another one that KinkForAll events make some people grapple with:

  • Academic / non-academic (education)

    • also known as

  • educated / uneducated
  • graduate / drop-out

I like this one because I’m a middle-school drop-out. But anyway, after she gave a presentation at the very first KinkForAll in New York City, Emily Rutherford wrote this in her blog about the experience:

I think that a lot of what was exciting about [KinkForAll] is the way that the format combines academic and non-academic modes of talking about sex and sexuality. The “conference” is an academic model in a way that many existing modes of social interaction for sexuality groups aren’t, but this conference didn’t presume any academic background or qualifications. I think that [KinkForAll] bridged gaps between different registers of discussion, taking academese down a peg while applying a theoretical and philosophical level to more casual conversations.

KinkForAll is not really an “organization,” just individuals acting in concert toward a share goal; a collective, maybe. I was urged, numerous times, to trademark KinkForAll and a few people thought it needed to be a registered 501(c)3 organization to really make a difference at all. But that’s just another false dichotomy, because we don’t need to be a 501(c)3 to make a difference.

Indeed, the millennial generation–our generation–is recognizing more and more false dichotomies, and younger people are consistently speaking up to make a difference. That’s what David Jay did in 2001, when he was a 19 year old undergraduate student at Wesleyan University just a few hours from here. David said:

Sexuality is like any other activity. There are people for whom skydiving, chocolate cake and soccer are their world. But some people don’t like skydiving, chocolate cake or soccer. There’s no reason to focus your energy and attention on something you feel no reason to do anything about.

That year, David founded The Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), which became the online headquarters for the asexuality movement. David recognized that even sex drive itself is correctly seen by many as coupled to dichotomies; that mens’ drives is necessarily stronger than womens’, for instance. Contrary to popular belief, sex is not a compulsion, and the desire for sex is not a universally shared instinct.

I believe AVEN’s work is enormously important because rape culture will dissipate and victim-blaming will stop only when everyone understands that our sex drives–our feelings of lust–are an independent facet of our sociosexual makeup. Men are no more or less interested in sex because they are men than women are. Perhaps counter-intuitively, asexuality is the keystone that supports a healthily sexual society.

All right, so, let’s review. Dichotomies come in two flavors: true and false. Both kinds are useful, and potentially sexy, but not good to confuse. So don’t let “man” or “woman” jail you. Don’t even let “animal” or “person” jail you! Hell, The Supreme Court isn’t letting the insignificant detail of corporeal existence prevent corporations from being people!

The bottom line is this: don’t wait for permission to do or be something that doesn’t fit into whatever or wherever other people happen to think you are. You don’t need someone’s permission to break out of a false dichotomy, or to become empowered.

You just do it. You can do it. We broke out of restrictive dichotomies just being at KinkForAll Providence! You’re doing it now if you’re watching this video, ‘cuz you’re thinking. So you don’t need to wait for your schools, or parents, or your teachers to fill you with knowledge, or to give you permission to grow in whatever direction you want. You’re doing it already.

You become empowered whenever you do what you can to make our communities places we can be proud of, no matter how small an act it is. Cuz, y’see, your impact, even through small things, like sharing a link to some educational resource like the one I followed to find the Kinsey scale when I was a teenager, are kind of a big deal.

People with destructive goals are usually people who feel personally disempowered. So to be creative, you need to empower everyone to speak up, to have a presence—even people you don’t totally agree with.

And thinking about that, and seeing as how I broached this subject of dichotomies with quotes from a writer, I thought it fitting to end with another quote from another, recently passed writer, Howard Zinn. Howard Zinn said:

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

KinkForAll is one of my small acts. Now it’s your turn. :)

Submit this content to FetSpank.com

Tagged with: ,

Comments (13)

Sunday, January 31, 2010

On Talking to Children and Adolescents about BDSM and Sex

Category labels: Beginner BDSM, Communication, Generation gap

In the past few months, I’ve seen a sharp increase in personal correspondence from people who are asking me (often via email) for clarifications, expansions, or simply personal advice. I’m flattered that people are beginning to look to me for serious advice on what are often painful or difficult questions. At the same time, I’m very scared by it.

I’m not a traditionally recognized expert about anything. Sure, I have street cred in some cyber-neighborhoods, but I don’t have a single piece of institutionally-backed credibility to offer. I’m not a doctor, a lawyer, a counselor. Heck, since I quit my day job recently, I’m not even any kind of professional anymore.

Now, that doesn’t mean I can’t offer my own opinions or that you shouldn’t find them informed—I do a lot of thinking about the things I write and speak about. What it means is that you should never blindly take what I say to you or what anyone says to you (yes, including doctors and lawyers and counselors) as though it were The Truth™. Knowledge, especially knowledge about yourself, can never be given, it must be grown. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that your choices should be based on anything other than your own convictions. If you remain open to embracing your own mistakes as learning experiences, you will never find yourself disempowered.

Now, with that out of the way, I recently received a very thoughtful email asking for further discussion about my two most recent posts regarding youth sexuality (On Youth, Sexuality, Education, and Your Fears and Sexual Adultism). In fact, I’ve received more than one, but this latest email was beautifully representative of the whole lot, so I want to address its contents in general and its author (who shall remain unnamed unless they wish to be associated with it) in specific. In order to respond coherently, I’m going to respond to the email in chunks.

Hello Maymay:

I was wondering if you would mind discussing this issue a little further. I’ve read and reread both your posts regarding adultism and youth sexuality several times over in an attempt to understand your point of view and for the most part, feel like I am failing miserably. I get what you are saying about having a safe place for people to discuss sexuality, but struggle with the assertion that all sexual topics are appropriate for all ages.

Let me start by stating that I’m uncertain where I ever said “all sexual topics are appropriate for all ages.” While I vehemently disagree with much of so-called conventional wisdom about what age-appropriateness entails and how it’s enacted, I do believe the premise of age-appropriateness is, well, common sense. It is just as appropriate for a parent to hold a child’s hands when they cross the street as it is appropriate for a parent to purchase “Where the Wild Things Are” instead of “Girls Gone Wild” for their toddler. The premise of age-appropriateness isn’t what’s at issue here.

What’s at issue here is the idea that age-appropriateness gives people who are older than other people the right to actively create obstacles to that younger person’s growth. That, by the way, is also the definition of adultism, that adults are somehow entitled to act upon young people without their agreement. I find it infuriating that our educational system is founded on the idea you are forced to study as you age, and yet somehow that same system actively barricades organic, natural, healthy sexual learning and growth simply because older people deem such topics “inappropriate.”

To give just one illustration of this very problem and misapplication of age-appropriate thinking, we need merely look to the recent news story of the Menifee County School Board, which banned the Merriam-Webster Dictionary from schools after a parent complained that it contained a reference to the term ‘oral sex,’ as I discussed on last week’s Kink On Tap. The parent’s complaint, that a collegiate dictionary isn’t appropriate for elementary school children, is logical but also damagingly overbearing. This parent who’s surely trying to protect their child, and who I would presume also doesn’t keep a bible in their house because it, too, is arguably rife with far more sexually explicit references than the dictionary, is actually stunting their child’s growth by paternalistically cutting off avenues of natural experience. And, for fuck’s sake, I was in elementary school when then-President Bill Clinton got impeached after getting a blowjob from Monica Lewinksy. It was all over the news, and so I’d like to hear what that Menifee County parent’s response to that would be for their kid.

Regardless of whether you believe that finding a reference to ‘oral sex’ in the dictionary is somehow going to harm an elementary school kid, the problem here is that you take away the child’s ability to practice having any kind of experience at all, good or bad, helped or harmed. I’m sure my parents wanted to protect me from ills, as all loving parents do, but they also thankfully (usually) realized that segregating me from the reality in which we all live would do more harm than good.

That’s the thing at the core of what age-appropriate misapplication is about, and that’s why I strongly disagree with the typical way it is practiced.

My two eldest children are 11 and 9 respectively and while I would be comfortable discussing a wide variety of sexual topics with them (IE homosexuality, transgender issues, polyamorism), the thought of discussing kink/bdsm with them at this point in time stops me dead in my tracks. My honest thought is that they aren’t yet mature enough to handle the majority of the topics contained under the bdsm umbrella. Hell, alot of adults struggle just to understand that bdsm is about consent and not about abuse. If my two eldest are struggling to internalize the concept of “you can’t slug your sister/brother just because she/he annoyed the shit out of you” and struggle to exercise impulse control when temptation rears it’s ugly head, then how in the world would they have the cognitive skills to understand more complex topics/concepts, IE humiliation, knife or needle play just to give a few examples?

I find myself confused by this. If your contention is that it’s due to the fact that “a lot of adults struggle just to understand that BDSM is about consent and not abuse,” why do you distinguish between BDSM and the many other sexuality issues you mention (transsexuality, polyamory, homosexuality, and so on) that billions of adults also struggle to understand in the most basic of terms? Honest question, I’m not just asking you, I’m asking everyone who’s ever made that distinction, because I just don’t get where it comes from.

Now, one distinction I think you should make that I don’t see you making is between sexual activity and sexual identity or desire. When you talk to your children about homosexuality, I presume you’re not telling them which brands of lube you think they should buy for the best anal sex experience. Similarly, why jump to conclusions that discussing BDSM has to be about sterilizing body parts for needle play?

Extrapolating for a moment, if I had a child and they came to me with a question about gay people, I’d probably discuss it in terms of gender attraction. I’d take the opportunity to explain that different people find different bodies attractive. Maybe something like, “Lots of people love people with different bodies than they have, but a lot of other people love people with very similar bodies.”

Similarly, if I was approached by this hypothetical child of mine with a question about BDSM, I’d probably discuss it in terms of power dynamics. Since power is the fundamental property of BDSM sexuality, it also strikes me as a particularly good segue into a discussion of self-empowerment. Perhaps, “Just as different people love people with different bodies, different people love others with different wants. Sometimes, as part of specific kinds of games, people find it fun to play by rules where one person gets to make decisions and the other person, only if they agree to it, will follow the rules.”

The point I’m making here is that talking to very young kids about sexuality—any kind of sexuality—rightfully starts by discussing the fundamentals, the 101s, if you will. Since these are fundamentals, they are widely applicable, and even if they include some explicit references, they never need to be eroticized (because yes, there is a difference between “explicit” and “eroticized”). It frustrates the living daylights out of me that so many people seem to forget this basic principle of growth and learning and start freaking out over whole subjects, rather than specific details, that they project would be “age inappropriate.”

While I’m on the topic about talking to young people about BDSM, I think this excerpt from Laura Goodwin’s short essay is appropriate:

Children kiss dogs, torture bugs, turn kitchen implements and power tools into toys, climb on furniture, mark their skins with ink or self-inflicted hickeys, and invent the most ingenious, nasty, kinky little games to play with each other (as we have seen), but for them that’s considered normal. Adults are supposed to know better.

There is no such thing as a vanilla child, but somehow we should mysteriously emerge from the teen years like a butterfly from a chrysalis, utterly transformed. A person is supposed to outgrow that stuff, not go and make a career out of it. Nobody told us that, though, because “we don’t talk about those things”. Sex is instinct: you are supposed to ~just know~ what to do.

Sugar Gak Cereal can sponsor “children’s television entertainment” that features bondage, funny costumes, and dominance themes, and that’s OK. Kids can play games that feature bondage, funny costumes, and dominance themes, and that’s OK, but if Mommy and Daddy play games that feature bondage, funny costumes, and dominance themes, that’s not OK. Excuse me?

Another prudent point to make right about now is this: I don’t think you have to, and arguably I would go so far as to say you shouldn’t bring up any specific sexual topic with your children out of the blue. If your child never asks about BDSM, or transgender issues, you don’t have to talk about it! But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t remain open to being approached about the subject, and prepared for the eventuality should it come to pass. The objective is to avoid cutting off avenues of learning just because you decided ahead of time that they’re damaging your kid instead of giving them an opportunity to grow healthily.

Back to the email:

This is where I believe the parents have to step in and based upon their knowledge of both the topic AND their children, provide some guidance and ultimately make the final decision as to what topics are age appropriate. Touchy subject, I know. […] Ultimately, someone has to make the difficult and often unpopular decisions and given that we have so much more life experience to draw upon than my children, I feel that my spouse and I should be the final authority because I believe we are better qualified to realize all the possible ramifications of some of the decisions they might want to make. This is not to say that our kids aren’t allowed to voice their opinions or their disagreement with the decisions we make, and we DO listen to them, try to take their feelings into account and try to explain to the best of our ability the reasons behind the decisions we make. But often they want to do what they want to do and no amount of reasoning seems to satisfy the answer as to why we won’t allow whatever it is they want to do.

Sure, your life experiences may be more quantitive, but can you in good conscious say they are more qualitative than your children’s are, especially when it comes to their experiences? I don’t disagree with the reasoning here, I just disagree with the framing. Specifically, I think it is a missed opportunity.

I would never presume to tell you how to be a parent, but since you asked for my opinions, I would offer the suggestion that each of these “putting your foot down” situations is an opportunity to explore an improved model of household governance. Parents often act like dictators in their own homes; the axiom “my way or the highway” will be familiar to anyone who experienced this as a young person. Instead, when there is a disagreement, why not use a collaborative decision-making model and reach decisions that way, so that you’re not only “listening” to your children but actually inviting them to offer their own solutions to your objections?

Such models of governance are, in fact, being experimented with for whole societies, so I imagine that some of their lessons could be applied here. For more about this topic, you might find the MetaGovernment project’s article about Synthesis interesting.

Anyway, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts on the matter. Even though I’m finding it difficult to agree with you, your posts did make me pause and examine my parenting practices to see if there are areas where I can improve.

It’s really encouraging to hear that I got you thinking. I don’t have any solutions for parents—I’m not a parent, I don’t want to be a parent anytime soon, and I don’t have any experience with adolescents (and that includes when I was an adolescent, since I was a real loner). That said, we were all children at some point, and I so often hear laments about sad childhoods that I simply know in my gut that it’s gotta be possible to make a future where all childhoods are safe, healthy and happy ones.

I sincerely appreciate the thought that you, and the several others who have written to me about this topic, put into your correspondence. That tells me that you, like me, reject the falsehood that to keep children safe, they must be censored. On behalf of future children everywhere, we thank you for that.

Submit this content to FetSpank.com

Tagged with: ,

Comments (5)

Monday, January 11, 2010

The Internet made me a sexual freedom activist in 2009. Now it’s your turn.

Category labels: Communication, Community, Kink events, Technology, Vanilla life

In case you haven’t yet heard, this upcoming Tuesday (the 12th) at the Center for Sex and Culture, I’m going to be co-facilitating Deviants Online, a new “workshop” series produced by Sarah Dopp, the inspirational founder of Genderfork.com. Sarah describes the workshop as:

a monthly social media discussion workshop in San Francisco for queers, sex nerds, artists, and other rebels. We dig into best practices and strategies for using tools like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, blogs, and email lists to make our lives more awesome.

Well, it’s certainly been an awesome year. As I wrote recently at MaleSubmissionArt.com:

For me, 2009 was a year of massive personal upheaval, as though a wildfire swept through my life and left me fresh and raw. It hurt, but like all natural processes, it also provided an incredible opportunity for rejuvenation.

Increasingly, one of those opportunities I want to pursue is continuing to develop the MaleSubmissionArt.com project. It began at the start of this year because there was a depressing lack of respectful erotic imagery of submissive masculinity. Today, it broke into the top 3,000 Tumblr blogs in the United States, and the top 6,000 in the world (according to Tumblr’s “Tumblarity” thing). If that weren’t cool enough, because it’s not, (as of this writing) it’s the top Google result for many variations of search phrases that are obviously about finding pictures of submissive men. Positive feedback has been pouring in, and I’m only now beginning to archive some of the praise for MaleSubmissionArt.com.

One month after starting MaleSubmissionArt, which took all of 2 hours (literally), I introduced the concept of KinkForAll, an ad-hoc sexuality “unconference” with the potential to greatly empower sex-positive advocacy and drastically improve sex education as we know it today. In a matter of mere months, less than one year later, 4 KinkForAll unconferences have produced an astonishing amount of free video, audio, and other content that’s continuing to snowball to this day. In fact, the video of my presentation at KinkForAll Washington DC has—in only 2 months time—received over 1,500 views, and is steadily spreading at the pace of about 25 plays per day (according to Vimeo’s public statistics).

And, most recently, I revitalized the Kink On Tap podcasts from way back in 2007, bringing interactivity and participation to a whole new level for sexuality netcasts. In only 3 months, and for an infinitesimal budget of a mere several hundred dollars raised purely from continuing donations, the weekly live broadcasts bring together a growing group of anywhere from 30 to 50 very animated individuals to the chat room, and several dozen more downloading and listening to the recorded Kink On Tap audio podcast available from iTunes. The show’s attracting superb guests, like Suraya Singh of Filament Magazine and Ms. SF Leather 2009 Mollena Williams, among a plethora of fantastic panelists who are excitedly sharing what they know and love about sexuality with our listeners.

None of this would’ve been possible without the incredible opportunities that the Internet brings with it. But none of this is enough—not even close. It’s wonderful that I’ve been doing so much, so inexpensively, and with such impact. But I’m not satisfied merely doing things. Underlying all of these projects is a much, much bigger goal: empowering you.

So I’m setting out for 2010 with the intention that this is the year that what I do with my time focuses not merely on educating, advocating, or informing, but also empowering the people with whom I interact. There’s a saying I recently learned that’s prevalent in software development communities: “Improve the improvers.” In other words, make it possible for passionate people to participate in your project immediately.

With renewed commitment to this goal, I quit my day job this past Friday. I have no clear idea about how I’m going to make a living, but I’m less concerned about that than I am about succeeding in my other goals. I feel like, if I do a good job with that (no pun intended), then a living will find me, somehow.

In the mean time, I’m eagerly preparing for this upcoming Tuesday evening at the CSC, where Sarah and I would love to see you for the January 2010 Deviants Online workshop. Or if you can’t make it for any reason at all, then perhaps someone you know—or someone who knows of you—can come, so please help spread the word to anyone you think would find this event helpful. :)

Here’s the entirety of Sarah’s announcement post about Tuesday’s event:

The first workshop was amazing – great conversation & lots of amazing ideas and concepts were brought up. We’re looking forward to doing it all over again in January – so here’s the information for you to add to your calendar, pimp out to your friends, and note in your holiday cards as you send them out. We hope you can join us – and bring along a buddy!

maymay

Meitar "maymay" Moscovitz

Deviants Online
hosted by Sarah Dopp
with special guest Meitar “maymay” Moscovitz

Tuesday, January 12th, 6 – 8pm
Center for Sex & Culture, 1519 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA
Cost: $10-20 sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds

Deviants Online explores the ever-changing “best practices” for social media: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, flickr, blogging, email, websites, and everything else. How can we shine spotlights on what we care about without annoying our friends? What are smart ways to strengthen our relationships and broaden our networks? And how exactly do we get our (many) personal sides to co-exist with our professional life on the same Internet?

As queers, creatives, sex nerds, and other rebels, our lives depend heavily on our friends and extended communities. Whether we’re looking for work opportunities, an audience, or an army of allies, we can all benefit from having a broader network built on trust and appreciation.

In this open-ended discussion workshop, we’ll explore what works and what doesn’t when it comes to representing ourselves online. The material will include a balanced mix of “how to think about it” and “how to do it,” and we’ll have plenty of time for questions. Whether you’ve just signed up for Facebook or have been blogging for years, you’ll leave this workshop full of ideas on what you want to try next.

Deviants Online is hosted by Sarah Dopp, social media educator and founder of http://genderfork.com. It will also have a special guest co-facilitator, maymay!

Why maymay is Awesome
Meitar “maymay” Moscovitz is a “technology geek, sexual freedom and community activist, prickly blogger, and general free spirit.” He makes his living as an Internet technology professional, providing web development, social media consulting, and other technology services. He is the co-author of Foundation Website Creation and AdvancED CSS,and a semi-regular blogger at SitePoint.com. He has lead sessions at conferences such as Sex 2.0, often speaks on the intersection of technology and sexuality, and is a co-founder of the BarCamp-style sexuality unconference series KinkForAll. He also curates the photoblog “Male Submission Art“, co-hosts the webcast KinkOnTap, and has dozens of other projects in various stages of creation.

***Please note: Portions of this event will be recorded and posted online. If you don’t want your voice, name, or image to be included in the recording, you can still come — we’ll give you easy ways to stay off camera. There will also be a stretch of time in the middle that’s completely off-the-record.

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (6)

Thursday, October 15, 2009

My latest project: Kink On Tap is reinventing smart sexuality netcasts

Category labels: Communication, Community, Kink on Tap, Technology

A little under a year ago, I introduced MaleSubmissionArt.com, a website featuring erotic imagery of men and other male-identified people as submissive subjects. Back then, you couldn’t even google the phrase “male submission art” without getting loads of naked, tied up, ostensibly submissive women littering your search results because there simply wasn’t a single resource of high quality visual erotica depicting men. Now, a mere 11 months later, MaleSubmissionArt.com has thousands of mentions, and is on the first page of Google search results for most variations of search terms that include the words “submissive,” “men,” and “pictures,” along with their synonyms.

One month after that, I introduced the concept of KinkForAll, an ad-hoc sexuality “unconference” with the potential to radically transform sexuality education and community building as we know it today. In 10 months, a driven core of participants and I have put on 3 separate unconferences in two major metropolitan areas, creating an ever-increasing amount of freely available videos, which have collectively gotten well over 1,000 total views, and audio recordings that feature sexuality-related information and education efforts. What’s more, we’re working to put together a fourth event, KinkForAll Washington DC, which will be held on November 21st at Bethesda Chevy-Chase High School that will continue to push for and support sexuality and civil rights advocacy. (Here’s the press release.)

Today, I’m pleased to announce that my latest effort, the reincarnation of Kink On Tap from what it was 2 years ago, is once again pushing the envelope for sexuality community building in a totally new way. This time, partnering with Emma from FollowsTheSun.com, I’m pushing sexuality podcasting away from static broadcasts and towards an interactive experience by recording them in front of a live Internet audience. With a chat room, a Twitter backchannel, collaboratively created show notes, and—as you hopefully expect by now—complete transparency with regards to our topics and future guest plans, I think Kink On Tap is a bold new step in reaching across community boundaries and connecting people in a way that empowers them to learn about and participate in making the world a better place for us all.

As the Kink On Tap about page reads:

Kink On Tap is more than just a netcast about sexuality; it’s also a community of people for whom intelligent conversations about sexuality and how sexuality relates to other aspects of their lives is a motivating force for Doing Good. If this sounds like you, then jump right into our community wiki, chat room, or live stream to join the conversation! And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook, of course!

So, as Tom said, What are you doing here? Why aren’t you listening to […] the latest Kink On Tap podcast? Emma and I have had a blast each time so far, and we’d simply love to see you in the chat room on Sundays at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific time. :)

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (6)

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

KinkForAll New York City: Rest and Recovery and Then We Do It All Over Again

Category labels: BDSM in the media, Communication, Community, Gender fluidity, Generation gap, Kink events, Personal experience, Technology, Vanilla life

I spent today recovering from KinkForAll New York City, which was an unbelievably smashing success. I’m so incredibly proud of what we were able to accomplish and so incredibly optimistic about the future, even if tentatively so. My tweet-stream from the day is now archived, and I’ve spent far too long reading and re-reading it already.

Organizing KinkForAll was a really new experience for me. I’ve never before seen a vision of mine that involved so many people so wonderfully executed. As I said during the discussion in the presentation Evan gave on Youth and Leadership, There’s a fine line between leadership and control.

Now that the first event has been a success, I can feel much more confident that the idea I’ve had for it is one that’s proven. Many people didn’t believe it could work, and I know there are still many others who are dubious—even close friends, like one I spoke to tonight. The biggest sticking points are obvious: 20 minute presentations are “too short,” playspaces “should be part of the event,” and of course, “encouraging cameras is a bad idea.”

To each of these I say that the NYC event, which was even more strict with regard to the timeframe than I thought it would be, had absolutely no playspaces and lacked even an after-party (which is unfortunate, because I think a simple after-party would be loads of fun after something like this), and only 1 day later already has 53 Flickr photos from the event posted online, proves the format and the methods we used are sound. Not only that, but I recall multiple people stopping me in the hallways and saying things like, “You know, I thought I’d show up and hang out for a half an hour, but now it’s 3 hours later and I really wish I didn’t have to go!” Further, and even more encouraging, several people also told me, “I really thought that 20 minutes would be too little time to do what I wanted, but I really love this 20-minute thing!”

There’s no question that this kind of event is something the sexuality communities at large really need. It’s not just BDSM people, but poly people, transfolk, queers, butches and femmes, and everyone else who takes part in public, social sexuality-related spaces obviously want to see happen. I’ve personally already heard from folks in Washington DC and Toronto who are interested in replicating similar events, and through several other channels multiple people in San Francisco have also expressed interest.

So yeah, talk about a smashing, unexpected success…. If you missed KinkForAll New York City, or if you were there but missed my presentation, Audacia Ray—one of the event’s two sponsors—offered to video record it and has put the video up on Vimeo for the world, and you, to see (below).


Maymay on Gender, Technology, and the Idea Behind Kink for All from Audacia Ray on Vimeo. (Watch other KFANYC videos.)

You can also download an audio-only version of the above video, which also includes an extra 10 minutes of Q&A that filled the rest of my presentation.

Of course, with such success I’ve got a whole new set of challenges. I don’t want this idea to be something intricately tied to my person—that’s entirely hypocritical and totally defeating of the point. At the same time, I want Toronto and DC and San Fran to experience the same kind of thing as we did in New York City. There are still some people in those areas that believe presentations need to be allowed to go longer than 20 minutes, that a playspace should be a requirement, and that other issues make holding the event itself too risky.

While a KinkForAll event in these other places cannot be identical to the one in NYC, at what point does such fundamental variation become something that’s not KinkForAll? Not something that’s necessarily bad, just something too different to bear resemblance. As I said earlier, how can I lead, without exerting undue and unnecessary control? It’s a balance I’m going to be challenged to strike accurately; I’ve never done that before.

Interestingly, some of the people who contacted me about wanting to run their own local events have expressed a specific distaste for the same sorts of things in the sexuality communities that I’ve also expressed many, many times before. This is no surprise, of course, but rather it’s an immense point of validation. In Evan’s presentation that I mentioned earlier, for instance, he mentioned trying and failing to bring some of the ideas present in KinkForAll to Black Rose. Later, others expressed similar frustrations at KinkForAll New York City, and still later more from DC expressed the same frustrations.

I’m sadly not surprised that efforts to catalyze established BDSM organizations have failed. In my experience, scene organizations are especially resistant to change and very, very ego-centric. They tend to enjoy power struggles for power struggle’s sake, and they fail to seize obvious opportunities for technical improvement when they do this. Naturally, I despise egotism when it gets in the way of good ideas because it actively creates very negative spaces, hence the free and open and autonomous nature of KinkForAll.

To do what I can for the incredible potential that’s here, I’ve thrown my hat onto helping KinkForAll Washington DC by signing up on the wiki page with “advocate+assist organization” for my participation, but it really isn’t my show, just as KinkForAll New York City wasn’t really my show. KinkForAll is all about doing, not saying, it’s about individual collaborations, not organizations, it’s about newness and innovation, not regurgitation, and —I want to make sure it remains an environment where actions and results speak louder than words.

To that end, I think the role of unorganizers like myself is really to make sure we exemplify that behavior. If we can continue to do that well, then everyone we recruit to help out will not only be much more helpful, but will also protect the goals and the methods of KinkForAll: flat organization, personal responsibility and autonomy, and results-focused behavior with a desire for creativity and positive social change in sexuality communities. I am unspeakably excited to see a KinkForAll Washington DC off the ground, so as my life begins to calm down, you can expect to see my activity in helping make the DC event a reality begin to ramp up very quickly.

I’m looking forward to it!

Submit this content to FetSpank.com

Tagged with: ,

Comments (9)

Friday, February 27, 2009

8 Things Submissive Men Want From A Dominant Partner

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Beginner BDSM, Communication, Male sexuality, Myths and misconceptions, Relationship, Vanilla life

My friend over at Kink In Exile, has recently posted a fantastic list of 8 things dominant women want. The list is so spot-on that I think it is a must-read regardless of whether you are in or are looking for a kinky relationship or not—or even if you’re not even “into all this kink stuff.”

I’ve been struggling to write more in this space lately. I want to, but between having to deal with the stress of moving to New York City from Sydney in less than two weeks and, more recently, the stress of losing my relationship with (Sara) Eileen, most kinds of words seem beyond me right now. Naturally, reading over a list of the things dominant women want during this time triggers a certain amount of introspection.

Kink in Exile’s list is so good, actually, if it were not unspeakably lazy of me I would want to copy it in its entirety for a post of my own. Instead of plagiarism, however, here’s a companion list of the things that submissive men want from a dominant partner that I think might be helpful. Astute readers of both my post and hers will note how similar these two lists actually are in content if not in voice. That, of course, is no coincidence.

For the sake of clarity, I’ll preface this list with an explicit remark about how it’s not intended to reflect anything other than a generic exploration into what I believe submissive men want from dominant partners, and should therefore not be interpreted without salting to your own taste, so to speak. I’d also like to acknowledge the excellent pre-publication input I received on this post by Kink in Exile herself, ironrose, as well as a few more friends. Thank you all for your thoughts.

You act upon details

Everyone’s fantasies—and demons—are in the details. Specific words, intonation, materials used in play (e.g., hemp rope versus metal bondage), and other things all have different meanings to different people. Personally, for instance, I react badly to words I associate with worthlessness (like “pathetic”) but favorably to others (like “whore” or “slut”) that I associate with wanton sexuality. While I am not alone in these particulars, there are others who respond in their own, unique ways.

It’s important to understand what these details are before you access them, but it’s equally important to eventually access them; ignoring such details is tantamount to ignoring me. When I play with a partner, a sense of depth and meaning is literally impossible to achieve if I have not first talked (usually at some length) about the details of my desires and fears, and asked questions of my partner to understand the details of theirs.

You need to be consistently inviting these details into our talks and our play; merely acknowledging their presence—without acting upon them later—is not enough. I do not believe a meaningful relationship can be built without successfully interfacing over these details.

You treat me as an equal person first and a submissive partner second

I am not a doormat—no submissive man is (even the ones that say they are). I see both dominance and submission as requiring equality first and power play second, and you should too. Moreover, you need to not only recognize but articulate the distinction in your actions when you demand something versus assertively request something of me.

My submission is a vital facet of who I am, so you never act in ways that are disingenuous, exploitative, or demeaning of my submissive sexuality, nor do you suggest that innate parts of who we are or the situations in which we exist (such as orientation, race, spiritual beliefs, socioeconomic status, or other external influences in our lives) make us unequal beings in any way. You strive towards fairness in all your dealings and recognize that our different wants and needs means that the goal of such efforts is equivalency, not sameness.

You can distinguish fantasy from reality, and objective reality from subjective interpretation

You understand how to live out a fantasy without living in a fantasy. This doesn’t mean so-called “24/7″ situations are unacceptable, because even in more casual relationships you need to be able to intelligently distinguish between playtimes and other times. Using protocols or any “lifestyle” behaviors as barriers to communication is not okay, so you must be adept at sussing out problems between us as well as vigilant in and receptive to addressing them.

You understand the difference between entitlement and advantage; you recognize the advantages you have that I may not share, but do not feel as though you are somehow more deserving of them. In reality, you do not consider yourself entitled to my submission or acts thereof. In fantasy and play, however, you are not afraid of asserting such behavior.

It’s also important that you remain aware of and empathetic to concerns I raise and act with consideration toward them both inside and outside of play. It helps if you also expect the same from me—don’t be surprised at my vehemence in encouraging your comfort and pleasure because doing so is a pursuit of my own happiness. Part of that pursuit is making the effort to build a common understanding of things between us, and I need you to make an effort to refine this understanding with me over time. Doing so will make it possible to interact with me as a dominant partner, a top, and a friend, all of which you need to be able to do.

You know and make your own desires clear

You are knowledgeable about yourself and communicate what you know openly, honestly, and freely. You needn’t be divinely enlightened but you do need to have a solid understanding of something you like and be assertive in asking for it. You must have actively pursued explorations into your own desires, or are at least actively pursuing them with me; your sense of self must be strong enough to weather discoveries of new desires in yourself and in me over time.

Being eager to often try new things (in terms of play specifically and in general) is also important because it tells me that you are interested in learning more about yourself, more about me, and more about how we work together in all of the ways that we do. You delight in novelty and discovery; you “know thyself,” and you share who you are with me—I think it’s sexy. Moreover, you encourage me to do the same because when I share who I am with you, it’s out of a desire for you to reciprocate.

You are confident and independent in your dominance

Your dominance cannot be your dirty little secret; my submission isn’t mine. You may be excited by taboo but you don’t rely on it to provide enjoyment (because very little is taboo with me). This does not mean that our play can’t be respectful of public boundaries; it means that you know wanting to see me in physical pain is not wrong or sick, and you know that my desire for such experiences is similarly not unhealthy. You enjoy challenging both my physical and mental endurance but are not out to inflate your ego by causing mine harm.

You are an independent, whole person and you celebrate your dominance as a piece of that whole. You are not dependent on my submission to validate your dominance. You appreciate the support and encouragement I provide and are self-sufficient enough not to need it at all times, self-empowered enough not to want it at all times. You do not need constant reassurance that basic aspects of our kinky sexuality are acceptable behaviors (e.g., “normal”).

You must be comfortable discussing and acting upon your own sadism, desire to receive service, or other potentially socially unacceptable traits for us to have fulfilling interactions (because I am similarly not always socially acceptable). Moreover, you need to have and be constantly developing a sense of your own skills so that you know what you can and can’t realistically and safely do. Feeling insulted or offended if I point out the realities of your potential shortcomings in these areas should be a warning sign to you—I do so because I want us both to become better at what we are doing.

You value my input and experiences

You reject the notion that my sexual submission negates the validity of my opinions and beliefs. You know that dominance does not equal superiority, and therefore you are willing and able to reexamine aspects of yourself. You solicit and incorporate input and feedback from me in doing this because you know that my perspective and experiences are valuable. You want our relationship—whatever form our relationship takes—to grow, our intimacy to deepen and you don’t expect this to happen without expending your own energy to help make it so.

You make me a priority and will treat me to indulgences

My submission doesn’t make me more willing to abandon my wants or needs than people who aren’t submissive are, just as your dominance doesn’t make you more entitled to have yours met. You know this and therefore make me the same kind of priority that I have made you. You make time to see me, play with me, and occasionally treat me to indulgences you know I like because you enjoy seeing me be happy.

Being dominant does not mean you get to do what you want whenever you want. Your dominance doesn’t free you of the obligation to treat me with consideration or respect, to dismiss my desires or concerns, or to unfairly prioritize your own wants over mine. This doesn’t mean that I feel inappropriately entitled or deserving of the things I want, and you must not resent me for having these needs or for filling them. Additionally, you are emotionally intelligent enough not to feel guilty or personally at fault when you can’t fulfill them for whatever reason, are communicative enough to speak frankly with me when such clashes arise (because they will), and trusting enough to believe me when I say I’m doing my best to resolve the situation.

Your dominance is personally meaningful

Being sexually submissive is just one facet of who I am. You desire to dominate me because my presentation of self—all of it—is personally attractive to you. You recognize my strength and power as well as my vulnerability and are aroused by both aspects of who I am.

You do not treat me as a replaceable object (out of a fantasy scenario) or as though I am a dime-a-dozen, cookie-cutter submissive man. You understand that our D/s relationship is about the relationship and the power dynamic, not the activities or toys or clothing; I am not a random man that will clean your house for free, and you are sensitive to the fact that any expectation of either this or similar depersonalization will feel exploitative and insulting.

You should feel just as eager to dominate me whether or not you are dressed in fetish gear, wearing makeup, are at a club with an audience, or have a particular toy handy. None of these things matter to me in terms of our connection during play because I desire you, not your image. You should not feel the need to conform to stereotypes you see in pornography, and you must not expect me to do that, either (because I won’t).

To submissive men, I want to say that many—if not all—of these things apply to you as well. Knowledge of yourself, self-acceptance, and confidence in your submission is not just healthy, it’s what makes you attractive to dominant partners (especially the intelligent, sexy ones). If you don’t think your own submission is sexy, how can you expect anyone else to?

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (31)

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Introducing KinkForAll: A no-limits gender and sexuality unconference

Category labels: Communication, Community, Kink events, Politics of sex, Technology

Update: KinkForAllNewYorkCity now has a date (Sunday, March 8th) and a venue (the LGBT Center). Our next challenge is finding sponsorships and continuing promotional efforts.

Update: KinkForAll New York City was a stunning success.

As if I didn’t have enough projects going right now, while here in Sydney, Eileen and I had an idea for a social and educational event that will promote positive ideals of sexuality from and to many communities and organizations. The idea is called KinkForAll, and I need your help to make the first KinkForAll event a reality this March. Below is the 411 on KinkForAll as well as links for where to learn more.

Most of all, I need your help to spread the word that KinkForAll event exists. To that end, please copy the flyer text below and post it on your blog(s), send it to any mailing lists you belong to, talk about it to your friends, and generally help get the word out. For this hugely beneficial movement to succeed, it needs enthusiastic participants on the ground—and that’s you!

I should probably also mention that I would greatly appreciate help in spreading the word even if you are not local to New York City. Simply spreading awareness about the New York City-based efforts and getting more people interested in this idea in general will be beneficial for people regardless of where you or they happen to live right now.

Here’s the flyer text to copy:

PLEASE COPY AND CROSSPOST THIS MESSAGE FREELY.

If you have already heard about KinkForAll through the grapevine, then please consider this email a reminder. If you haven’t, then please take a minute to scan this message. You’re receiving this message because someone trusts you to read it with an open mind. Smile! :)

Vitals
======

What: A no-limits sex-positive gender and sexuality unconference.
Why: To inspire a creative, interactive and open environment where everyone feels comfortable talking, learning, and being inspired by all kinds of sexuality.
When: March, 2009 (exact date yet to be determined)
Where: NYC (We’re still looking for a venue! Can you help? See ‘Get Involved,’ below!)
Who: Everyone
How much: Free (as in beer as well as freedom)

Details
=======

KinkForAll is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people of the kink, queer, sex-positive and related communities to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, presentations, and interaction from all participants.  (It is inspired by the BarCamp community.)

ANYONE WITH SOMETHING TO CONTRIBUTE OR WITH THE DESIRE TO LEARN IS WELCOME AND INVITED TO JOIN. When you attend, be prepared to share with others. When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

A KinkForAll is a special kind of gathering because there are no spectators, only participants. Attendees must give a talk or a presentation, help with one, or otherwise volunteer/contribute in some way to support the event. This is called sharing and we like it. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen—there are no pre-scheduled presentations or keynote addresses. The people present at the event will select the presentations they want to see.

Anyone can present, on any topic related to sexuality. You do not necessarily have to teach a new skill or idea. You might share an experience, review a product, or read a poem. The goal is to start a discussion, make connections, and exchange knowledge. Presentations promoting specific commercial products or companies are discouraged.

Learn more about what to expect at
http://kinkforall.pbwiki.com/WhatToExpect

Learn more about the event guidelines at
http://kinkforall.pbwiki.com/TheRulesOfKinkForAll

Get Involved
============

We need your help in spreading the word. Please help by participating. Here’s how:

1. Get excited by reading the ideas on http://kinkforall.pbwiki.com/KinkForAllNewYorkCity
2. Add your name or handle to the list of participants
3. Join the mailing list and introduce yourself by emailing kinkforall@googlegroups.com

If you have access to a venue, or know someone who has access to a venue, please email the kinkforall@googlegroups.com mailing list with that information.

Still have questions? Read the Frequently Asked Questions at
http://kinkforall.pbwiki.com/FrequentlyAskedQuestions

or email kinkforall@googlegroups.com for more details.

KinkForAll Online
=================

Participate online before the event at your favorite social networking web site.

Homepage: http://KinkForAll.org
Google: http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall
Twitter: http://twitter.com/KinkForAll
Identica: http://identi.ca/kinkforall
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/KinkForAll/40066342762

All primary organizational efforts are being coordinated via the mailing list. Join for free and help turn ideas into realities!
http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall

The flyer text to copy is above this line.

I’ve already been thrilled at some of the inertia that is beginning to build behind this idea. The implications of such a thing happening are remarkable!

One of the things I’ve been frustrated with for a long time is the utter lack of accessibility to young people when it comes to these topics. Sure, we have gender studies courses (if you’re in school—which I am thankfully not), but these are academic circles that have little to no interaction with the wider community. That is terribly sad.

Further, if a young person (or frankly, ANY person of any age) wishes to engage the wider sex-positive community in the places where it has its discussions, this comes with a terribly high price tag. Sexuality conferences run by the sex communities are typically large, expensive, and very intimidating. Many people, not just young people, just don’t have several hundred dollars and a week’s time to dish out going to sexuality events where the primary attraction is…well, having some kind of sex. (We can fuck for free, thank you.)

In response to this, I’d like to bring the ideals and philosophies of transparency with privacy that exist today in the open source/technology communities to the sex-positive communities. I feel this is a natural fit because the power of the people is never so strongly heard as when it is showcasing the power of human sexuality and love. It is a real tragedy that sexuality communities do such a horrendously poor job of taking advantage of available social technology to further their cause. In addition to everything else, starting KinkForAll is also an attempt to help rectify that situation.

This kind of an unconference is not a new idea. If you examine the BarCamp.org pages, you’ll see a massive similarity between them and the pages at KinkForAll.org. This is intentional. I’ve been at BarCamps of various kinds before and the results are always outstanding. I am convinced that replicating the same positive energy is possible for sexuality communities, albeit slightly more difficult because of the novelty of the idea for this group of people.

Such unconference-style gatherings are purposely loosely structured in order to let regional and communal influences permeate the event. That is a good thing. It means that KinkForAll as a concept will evolve in parallel to the notions created by BarCamp. At the same time, it’s important that people who care about the idea and the potential for positive social change that it has are able to guide the concept as an idea in that positive direction. This is why the “rules” of KinkForAll are written so meticulously, and are so carefully generalized. You’ll find several references to the fact that this is not a play event, for example, and that this differs from other events run by the BDSM and related communities in particular, well-defined ways. Again, this is intentional.

If any of this strikes a chord with you, you can read more at the introduction on the mailing list. I also strongly encourage you to participate—the only cost is your time and effort, and you get to decide how much of that you want to spend. The benefits, however, can be immeasurable.

Submit this content to FetSpank.com

Tagged with:

Comments (19)

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Equating passivity with sexual submissiveness is a stupid mistake

Category labels: BDSM psychology, BDSM techniques, Chastity/Orgasm denial, Communication, D/s dynamics, Fantasy, Femdom, Masochism, Myths and misconceptions, Personal experience, Relationship, Technology

This weekend I’m making a concerted effort to spend more time than I might otherwise with Eileen because we’ve been enjoying reconnecting with kink lately and there is just so much work to do during our “normal” days.

Once again, as part of tasks she had charged me with accomplishing, Eileen wanted me to write and read another fantasy snapshot to her. This time, however, she gave me a specific direction to go in: write about harems, a recurring fantasy genre of hers. I did this successfully (and if you’re really just here for the pr0n then, here it is) but what she found interesting about it was how much I worked my own kinks (technology, orgasm control) into the piece. My thinking here was pretty straightforward, since all I did was figure that what I’d produce wouldn’t be any good if I wasn’t interested in writing it.

One of my other tasks was to buy her a specific sort of jewelry. This has been an area of relative discomfort for her as a top and, like my own discomfort vocalizing fantasies, is something she and I would like to see her become more comfortable with. Rather than refer to this jewelry as a gift, which is heavily laden with negative stereotypes of gender roles, we’ve been referring to it as a form of tribute, but admittedly that’s not much better either. When I buy her things, and especially when she “makes” me buy her things, she sometimes still feels the resonance of guilt, and so I feel bad about making her feel guilty, and on and on the vicious spiral goes.

For me, however, buying things for her is not difficult because my relationship with money is vastly different from hers. To me, money is accumulated for one purpose only: to be spent. Money is nothing but a manifestation of some kind of confidence in a product, in a service, or in some other thing perceived to have a value of sorts. Since it’s my money I’m spending, I get to spend it on whatever I want. More often than Eileen may be ready to believe, what I want to spend it on is her. Still, financial domination is not really my kink, it’s hers.

What I want for her is to be able to experience guiltless pleasure by enacting kinks and fantasies. That’s why I was happy to see that one of my tasks was to do this thing that, should I be successful, she would find emotionally challenging to accept in a way. And that’s also part of why instead of buying her the one piece of jewelry she tasked me with acquiring, I secretly bought two. Then, that night, I bought her an even more expensive bottle of perfume on a complete whim and treated her to dinner.

My goal was the same as hers: to push limits. We push each other, we always have, and it’s part of what keeps us moving forward together. Though the willingness to push a bottom’s limits is almost a prerequisite to advertise yourself as a top or a dominant, very rarely does anyone seem to recognize the value of pushing a top’s limits as a bottom, and I think that is a grave oversight for all involved. Often, people expect—sometimes even demand—that bottoms and submissives be entirely passive partners in sex and kink, but I think this is wrong.

Equating passivity with submissiveness is just as brain-dead stupid as equating power with penises. When I’m willing to actively push my top’s limits, everything is more fun. That doesn’t mean that I’m “topping from the bottom” in the way many people think of it. I’m not bossy or a brat, I don’t talk back in scenes and I don’t tell you where to hit me (unless that’s part of the scene, or you ask me to, of course). What I mean when I say that I like to push my top’s limits is that I respectfully and incrementally encourage them to explore their sadism, their cruelty, their willingness to impose their will on my body, perhaps in ways that they may not feel entirely comfortable doing but that I do.

I do this for a number of reasons. The most obvious one? It turns them on, and then they do things to me that I like. With Eileen, the other day, this meant I spent quite a bit more money on her than she was immediately comfortable with. This active submission or bottoming has also manifested itself in most of the scenes where my tops told me “Okay, I think I need to stop now.” I half-jokingly say that I want to collect as many tops as I can who I can get to say this. So far, there are five, and I’ve enjoyed playing with each of them (and I hope I get to again, one day)! (You know who you are. ;)

Anyway, the good news for me is that I successfully accomplished all of the tasks I had been given. This has earned me the consideration of a possible orgasm, Eileen said, though she has not specified a time for this. This reward was phrased very deliberately, and perhaps one day I’ll get around to writing about the particulars of what earning something means (though Ms. Rika has already written a fair bit about treats versus rewards, which talks a bit about earning stuff).

At any rate, what I’ve earned is very nebulous because “consideration of a possible orgasm” is basically just like saying “maybe, we’ll see.” This has left me wondering (and fantasizing) about what will happen. Nevertheless, even as day 35 of being kept orgasm-less draws to a close for me tonight, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Now, without further ado, as promised, here’s the harem fantasy snapshot that I read aloud to Eileen this morning.

I kissed her firmly on the lips, gently pulling her down with me as I leaned back onto the massive bed and sank further into the gold threaded sheets. She responded by parting my lips with her tongue, one of her hands encircling both my thighs and the other pressing her body into mine. I twisted my body so she was on her side and moved my mouth to her neck. That was my purpose: to exist for her pleasure. The years I had spent in this place had taught me how to fulfill this purpose well.

“You are so lucky,” one of the other boys told me one day as we sat on the marble steps of the pool.

“Why?” I asked.

“And you’re dumb,” he replied wryly. “How can’t you see it? She adores you. She takes you more often than any of us,” he said as he gestured around the room, a hint of envy in his voice.

The sunlit pool hall had white stone walls with large glass doors and a few stained glass windows depicting young men and women in various states of servility. A dozen or so other slaves like I were swimming and a few more were lounging elsewhere in the hall. Most of us were naked, and those few who weren’t might as well have been, as we were given very little in the way of fabric for coverings by our keepers. Instead, we typically wore jewelry whose particulars were carefully chosen to match our body’s aesthetics. Many of the darker-skinned slaves wore intricate silver bands while I wore lots of copper, rose gold, and turquoise to compliment my pale skin.

I cocked my head and grinned back at my friend. “That makes me sore, not lucky,” I said to him.

“Still,” he said, the envy turning into a soft sigh, “you get more stimulation than we do.”

We were not only kept as pleasure slaves, we were also slaves to pleasure. Shortly after being bought, I was strapped to a contraption that left strategic parts of my skin perfectly hairless and others incredibly erogenous—even some that had not been before. Despite my fear and anguish that first dark night, I couldn’t help but masturbate through my tears. Strangely—cruelly, I thought—nothing I did brought me to the satisfaction I craved and yet every other sensation seemed amplified such that merely the feel of the sheets in my new bed filled me with lust. At first I thought these sensations were hallucinations, but when I braved asking the others they told me similar stories. “It keeps you eager for her,” they said, and they were right.

I soon learned that she alone had the power to satisfy my body, though I didn’t understand why that was so. We never knew when she might choose to sample one of us, and yet eager as I and the rest of us were for it, much of the time it was not pleasant when she would. I frequently sported bruises, and more often than not she chose to take her pleasure from me with seemingly little regard for my own obvious need.

In her bed, she rolled her hand in my long hair and pulled my mouth off her neck, exposing my own to her tongue. I shivered, whimpering as goosebumps appeared on my flesh. To avoid the maddening stimulation, I pushed my mouth back to her neck and tried to focus my attention on the mundane parts of the act, like the motion and pressure of my lips.

Then I saw her eyes glint just so. She grabbed my wrist and pulled it by the copper bangle I wore from her side to the restraint in the headboard, which automatically held my jewelry in its grasp. I held my breath, fearing that tonight would not be one of the pleasant nights.

As a final aside, I’ve posted this vignette into the Hypertextual Porn wiki because that project needs a little tender lovin’ care at the moment and I think this is a good piece to begin loose construing, a good snippet to remix with, as it seems like it can go in any number of directions.

I’m hoping that, over time, I’ll be able to create an archive of lots and lots of snippets like this so that erotica authors might find interesting ways to mix and match and modify them to suit their story ideas. If you’ve got some short, erotic vignettes you’d feel comfortable contributing to the project (and basically releasing your writing as “open source” hypertextual porn), then please take a peak at the project’s homepage.

Submit this content to FetSpank.com
Comments (14)