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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Years pass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She wasn’t even aiming for me.

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

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

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

—“Creep“

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

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

—Thomas Paine

Kink, in exile:

There has been an explosion around the topic of male submission. Holding space for it, celebrating it, legitimizing it and so on. This has been amazing to witness[…].

[…]

I’m awake at 4 in the morning furious and saddened by every account of pain, belittlement, and exclusion I’ve read. Outraged that it took me this long to figure out that my difficulty in finding submissive men in the BDSM scene was not an isolated incident and even more outraged by what these men have gone through.

So this is the moment when I cry through my anger, because when morning comes for real I’ll put on my big girl panties and go out to change the world. But right now I’ll just send a shout-out to all the men who have been strong enough, amazing enough, and brave enough to plow through the bullshit and let me see them on their knees while I cry through my optimism.

Galiana Chance:

It started with @maymaym (the guy behind the visual-celebration-of-male-submission site MaleSubmissionArt.com) posting a link to this incredibly well-written piece discussing how often members of the BDSM scene devalue male submissives, even while valuing female dominants.

[…]

Every voice that speaks out in celebration of male submissives helps the conversation. Tonight, the urge to join the conversation overwhelmed me. I had to join.

Professor Chaos:

[I]t’s about fucking time. Because the kink scene treats male subs as if they are unwanted, uninvited guests, not recognizing the fact that they are real people with feelings of their own, that their dominant partners cherish them. Every time I see a Fetlife profile that reads “I’m not attracted to submissive men” (frequently, in my experience, on the profiles of female switches and occasionally other female dominants), my stomach clenches. They don’t seem to realize that such an attitude is linked to another problem in the scene: the tokenization of female dominants.

Perhaps the deepest pain many female-identified people have shared with me, whether kinky or otherwise, dominant or submissive, whether young or old, fat or thin, disabled or abled, queer or heteronormative, married or single, monogamous or polyamorous, is the resentment of believing that no matter the sex they have, a male partner feels satisfied while they do not.

“It makes me jealous,” one woman told me over beers.

I nodded. “It should,” I agreed with her. But it has been difficult for me to trust that the depth with which I can empathize is actually understood. For as long as female sexuality is perceived as performative, male sexuality—regardless of its diversity—is perceived as entitled. But, trapped in gendered frames, neither female nor male sexuality is monolithic; the submissive masculine is therefore revelatory.

As Tomio Black said,

The main task before me is to depathologize #MaleSubmission so that it is seen as a normal and healthy way for people to authentically love.

Or, in Chaos’s words:

While male subs are not seen as potential objects of desire, female doms are seen only as objects of desire. That’s how I feel sometimes as a femme dom in the public scene: they see me, but not my desires.

[…]

And so I feel tokenized. It’s not fair to me, because where would I, a femme dom, be without my masculine sub? We are two sides of a coin. Today I am not beating my queer drum; today I am borrowing maymay’s drum: You cannot truly respect me without respecting my submissive as well. If you value me, you must value him.

“I finally figured out what upsets me about your blog,” one man said, turning to me after a time.

I smiled and turned to face him. “Really? Please tell me!”

“Now that I’ve read your writing, it’s harder for me to just enjoy the BDSM play I do and the sex I have without thinking about how it affects people like you and the culture we live in.”

“That’s wonderful!” I said, my smile widening. He frowned, but it was a friendly frown, his eyebrows furrowed pensively rather than aggrieved.

Submissive men are not monolithic, either. In a comment on Chaos’s post, I plaintively said:

It is a sad fact that most submissive men I have encountered are misogynistic shitwads. They are not exactly helping you or I find cultural acceptance, Tomio, and yet I have an enormous compassion for them because I can so clearly see the pain, desperation, and ignorance at the root of their aggressively obsequious behavior.

One day last year, I was invited to a semi-private dinner party following a sexuality conference. There, an older man, well-known in the sexuality communities for the sex toy company he owns, approached me, drink in hand. He was poorly shaven, his mismatched clothing adding to his unkempt appearance. Something in his eyes betrayed the existence of a continual internal monologue that may have never been shared with another person.

“After I saw your KinkForAll Providence video,” he started, “I’ve been reading your blog. And I just wanted to say I really like it. You put words to stuff I couldn’t say on my own.”

The party was bustling, but small. We moved to a corner of the dinner table and continued talking. He told me of finding Playboy Magazines as a teenager, of growing up into a man with a 9-5 job and an unhappy social life. “I’d get up, go to work, come home at five or six, and look through the [local paper] for the sex ads.”

“Did you ever go?”

“A bunch of times.”

This is an aspect that deserves more words. For now, Galiana offers some that I have angrily (and, to some, offensively) stated years earlier:

I’m starting to understand my potential value in this conversation: to answer the question of “where do male submissives go if they don’t feel comfortable at ‘BDSM scene’ events?” I believe that large numbers of them go to anonymous online female dominants for pay, at least now and then. (I’m a phone sex operator, so this isn’t simply a theoretical idea I’m espousing – I make part of my living talking to them, bless their broken hearts)

And there, online, the extremes of the fantasy are even more heavily emphasized, because it’s simpler to market an extreme, and most people do not have the ability to market nuance. In fact, I’m not sure it’s possible to market nuance at all.

So a male submissive who feels rejected by an in-person group for free may try his hand online for pay, and be met with a WALL of “Dominas” calling him a loser, a wanker, a pathetic bitch, etc, and then… well, then, he either accepts those labels and sees himself as “less than”, or …

Or he remains unspeakably strong in the face of all this stupidity and keeps holding his head high until he finds a partner who is worth him lowering his eyes to. May it be so, over and over.

I don’t believe I could ever feel comfortable paying for sex or BDSM play of any kind—and so to date I never have. But, now, I do better understand its undeniably legitimate value.

Sitting across from the older man that day at the conference’s after party, I asked him, “Do you still see sex workers and pro-dommes?”

“No, I work all the time now,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“It makes me happy to know that the toys I make give other people great orgasms. I just wish someone would want to use one of my toys on me, sometimes.”

“Your girlfriend doesn’t?”

He raised his glass and waved the drink around, looking around with a frown on his face. I didn’t pry. Instead, I said, “I know. It’s hard for me, too.”

He looked at me, disbelieving. It’s become inevitable; I’ve had this conversation with enough people to know where it was going. “Come on,” he said, “you must play all the time.”

I shook my head. His arm hit the table with a thump. He slouched further in his chair. “Oh, man. If you can’t get play, I’ll never….”

There was a long silence. He looked around at the apartment we were in. All of the guests had left the living room and were busy chatting with one another in the kitchen, having drifted further and further away from us—a perfect metaphor for our current topic of conversation.

“How do you do it?” he asked at last.

“Do what?”

“Keep writing.”

I smiled. “What would you do after you’ve given up on having a sexually satisfied life?” I asked him.

“God, I don’t know,” he said.

“Why do you keep making sex toys?” I asked. He looked puzzled, so I explained: “You’re the giant on whose shoulders I’m standing. Thank you so much.” Slowly, he nodded. We drank more.

If you’re reading this, and you own certain sex toys, it’s quite possible you have this man to thank for that. I do. But you’ll never need to thank him. You’ll never have to be grateful. All you have to do is take it for granted—and understand why that is a good thing. As Galiana Chance put it:

Ideas spread. They may spread slowly, but imagine how much greater the chances are now of forming a healthy femdom/malesub relationship than even just 20 years ago. I remember 1991 – I was 21 – and how little information I had available to me. My mind boggles.

More recently, I was in Seattle, unexpectedly performing at a Polyamory Fashion Show at The Center for Sex Positive Culture. There, a woman approached me while I was talking to a friend who lives in that town. “It looks like the lady would like to talk to you,” I said to my friend, about to excuse myself.

But before I could, the woman turned to me, saying, “I just wanted to thank you for MaleSubmissionArt.com.”

Surprised, I turned to my friend, then back to the woman. “Oh, um, thanks.” I introduced myself to her more formally. My friend politely excused herself, nodding at me as she gave us space to talk.

“I’m a switch, but I wanted you to know that your websites have really helped me enjoy topping men lately. Can I give you a hug?” the woman asked.

“Uhm, sure,” I said, smiling as I realized the full meaning of her words: sometime in the last two years or so, somewhere in the world, this woman and a man she played with had a good time thanks, at least in some small part, to my publications. We embraced. “Hugs are great!”

Long ago, Susan B. Anthony said, “It is not our job to make young women grateful. It is to make them ungrateful, so they keep going.”

In affirming Chaos’s sentiments, Kink In Exile wrote:

[W]hat does it mean for me in this world that the person I want to play with most, that beautiful strong geeky smart sexually submissive man, comes wounded because the world got to him before I had a chance? I have been known to speak to the fact that men are hurt by the rape of women because their sex life can not help [but] be effect[ed] by a one in four chance that their female partner is a survivor of sexual violence. Is this the BDSM parallel? There are no submissive men and also there is never a line for the ladies room in the engineering building? Are submissive men and women in short skirts equally public property?

If we need a respite, let’s celebrate the small victory of this burgeoning conversation. And, then, keep going.

And it's go boys go
They'll time your every breath
And every day you're in this place you're two days nearer death
But you go…

Well a process man am I and I'm tellin' you no lie
I work and breathe among the fumes that tread across the sky
There's thunder all around me and there's poison in the air
There's a lousy smell that smacks of hell and dust all in me hair

—Great Big Sea

I want to put all this—this blog, my other one, my interest in yours—away. And I’ve felt this way for a while. And I’m so sorry.

I’m sorry because there are so many things I still want to say. In recent months, my drafts have exploded from around 10 to over 30. I wanted to write in greater detail about how the BDSM Scene made me feel unwantable; I wanted to write praise for the older submissive men on whose shoulders I stood; I wanted to write an analysis of how and why “creepers” are attracted to, incubated by, and remain in the Scene; I wanted to write about the night at the club when I experienced the closest thing I ever have to sexual harassment and how awful it felt; and I wanted to write about why, despite the disdain oozing from my flesh, I now feel an immense swell of compassion for the person who kept touching me after I said “no.”

I wanted to write about the people who send me private letters of support, and also the ones who find it necessary to share their delusions that I rape young boys. I wanted to write about the BDSM Scene as the closest thing I’ve known to a cultural home, and how important having that is to me. I wanted to write about why I fear that putting all this away would feel too much like self-imposed exile, and why I want to put it all away anyway.

So, day in and day out lately, I write but do not publish. Though reticent to let it show, I am very often scared of all this. And yet, I feel called to these tasks like a moth to a flame.

There are so many reasons why.

Puny Kingship

In mid-April, shortly after I published my “unreal” experiences at the Kink, Inc. Armory, a comment reading simply, “Thoroughly predictable,” was left by someone calling themselves “Sexually Opulent.” The pseudonym was a simple clue; it was the 38 year old self-identified dominant man I had quoted early in the piece. Minutes later, his FetLife profile contained the following writing:

So here he goes again, and since he’s decided to use parts of our conversation in the public sphere, here is the whole thing. Mind you, it took him saying something like the following to make me call him out publicly for being such a fucking weak-ass male submissive that he makes male submission look bad:

[full page HTML, archived here]

Yeah, you’re a paragon of sociability. You ignore the logical arguments and spout opinion. Now you’re spouting intuition as being as valid as an observable fact, have the only negative quotes in your new blog entry being from VISITORS to the armory rather than from employees, and completely miss your own sexism when saying you questioned your gender identity because of your submissive ideas, something akin to saying a woman who likes being on top should consider if she wasn’t actually meant to be born with a cock. And let me make this clear to you, if it’s that hard to stay alive, perhaps you should consider the alternatives.

Although it remained up for a while, I recently noticed the post was deleted. But since his reaction was another perfect illustration of the very poison I wrote about, I snapped several screenshots (and even saved a .webarchive for Safari users) to ensure his attitude—so you think I’m “a fucking weak-ass male submissive,” do you?—would be captured in perpetuity. I am drawn to this flame because I will not permit him—I will not permit you, Fistandantilus—the luxury of running from your own words, and I am no moth in your cowardly light.

To all who’ve tried to intimidate me: Thank you for teaching me why there exists more strength in my greatest vulnerability than exists in your most powerful outburst.

While I do gain a certain satisfaction from such encounters, these are merely proving grounds for my own parrhesiastic experiments. I accord such sparring partners only a bare minimum of care; they are poisons in the air. When they are fearfully cowed to, indifferently subsumed, or revered like kings of their petty, puny hills, The Scene, a far too unctuous and aristocratic environment both, is an abuser.

Heroes’ Muse

In early June, I opened my email and there was a letter addressed to me:

Hi MayMay

I googled up Male Submission Art the day before yesterday to find pictures for a friend, and ended up reading your blog for almost an hour.

[…]

I like that you gather material exalting the physical form and emotional concept of the submissive man, material that addresses the submissive man as a beloved individual and as a sex object, because I’m fucking sick of the unending kink porn drivel that tells me that as a female-bodied sexually dominant person, I’m supposed to base the sex I have with male-bodied people around devaluing my partner’s desirability. I want my partner to submit to me because he is desirable, because I adore him. Why would I ever want to push a person to their limits if I don’t have care nor curiosity about what that person is made of? Why would I want to have someone spread out for me if I’m not fascinated and delighted by what’s being made available? How can I trust someone to let me hurt them if we can’t communicate with each other on a human level about what we’re doing? I really struggle with feeling like I don’t want to label or disparage people for whom the mainstream femdom thing works, but speaking privately… you know, uh, to a stranger, like you do… I just fundamentally cannot understand this bullshit.

I’m also tired of scanning messages from submissive guys who don’t see me as a person, and who don’t or can’t imagine themselves being simultaneously submissive and valued, but are looking for — I don’t even know what, for a vagina-bot in stilettos, for both of us to fill empty roles based on gender essentialism and dehumanization. I love that you are adamant that it’s not enough to settle, that you want something that’s true and, as much as I tend to roll my eyes at this word, authentic. I’m really sad that you’re not finding what you want and need, because I can’t help but think that you can’t be the only one who feels this way, just like I know that other people like me exist, and many struggle to untangle their genuine desires from having been twisted or silenced by gender training. I suspect you must stand for others who may arrive at the party of human sexuality bright-eyed only to finally leave disillusioned, letting go of the hope of fulfillment, or settling for less than what they deserve.

And I’m just so mad about it! Fuck that, the entire thing, because it’s totally, totally stupid.

Yeah, I think that’s pretty much what I wanted to say. So I hope you had a good day, and from my friend’s incoherent, glee-filled phone call a minute ago, she appreciated the pictures I grabbed from MSA. I told her to go check it out when she gets a chance. There really are tragically few resources for me to point her toward, which, really, sums up the whole damn thing.

This person is who I accord care. They are nobody’s hero—except mine. While they are unseen by and often in The Scene, they exist, damnit, and they matter and they are the goodness in the future!

On a personal level, this email has been my answer to the question of what and why I’m still even here, still alive—and still writing—in a poetic-literal sense. But it’s also why what I’ve come to call the Work will never be “done.” The day I stop getting emails like this on a regular basis is the day I will no longer be drawn to the tasks that inspired them.

While nothing I do will ever be enough, in the face of that feeling I can at last feel that I have done something. I’m getting copied. A lot. Kind of all over the place. In places I didn’t even know existed. Places I don’t even have the mental equipment to access; another thing I wanted to write but have as yet failed to do.

At a recent BDSM munch in Berkeley, a young person introduced herself to me. “Hi,” she said, offering a handshake and stating her name. “Hi,” I responded, shaking her hand. “I’m maymay.” She froze momentarily, still holding my hand, and I saw recognition cross her face. Then, smiling, she said, “Awesome.” We spoke for a while, and she told me of how she once got a comment on an old MySpace blog from someone who signed up specifically to leave the comment. The comment said simply, “Thank you for writing what you did; it helped me.” That’s when she became another of my heroes.

I look around now and I see even more personal heroes, a multiplicity of thought-replicants. Stabbity is writing great rants in the style of the sorely-missed Bitchy Jones. Thanks in part to Dev’s significant piece on the topic of devaluing male submission, discussions about it have flourished in a number of places, including look-alike venues whose rhetoric I despise. There’s also a whole interview series with submissive men in which the issue is a recurring theme. Even whole new blogs with the premise are sprouting.

Heroes make me happy.

Replicant Offspring

It’s no accident my heroes were birthed by the Internet. “Sexual reproduction,” as Donna Haraway wrote, “is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function of the system environment.” In what can perhaps be viewed as an ironic technological re-appropriation of sexual determinism, I have impregnated The Scene’s spaces using cybernetic replication; other people’s minds offered presequenced cultural genetic material, instruments to engineer a more humane culture. The act is pleasurable, certainly, though crude and often still uncomfortable.

In desperation, denying parts of my own didactic lust for corporeal sensation, I ruptured and reconstituted myself an intellisexual cyborg who thrived on the orgiastic exchange of conceptions rather than bodily fluids, a kind of idea-sex in which hyperlinks are sex toys. (Probably strap-ons.) My persona is now so thoroughly projected on the thin surface of cyberspace that I feel offering you this digitized dossier has cost me the depth of my life. Yet it has also rewarded me with a kind of awkward attractiveness I could not attain when decoupled from my electronic prosthetics.

By the same reasoning, it is also no accident that I am a brutal critic of the BDSM Scene at this moment in history, nor that I would critique it using the lore of radical transparency, diversity, and accessibility—all gleaned from techno-privileged open sources. For all intents and purposes, I am the illegitimate offspring of The Scene and The State at a time when the literary telepathic non-magic of the Internet threatens them both. And, still borrowing from Haraway, ”illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.”

And I feel Haraway was prescient in more ways than this. You, my heroes, are also cyborgs, for you are simultaneously everywhere and invisible. So if you are also my replicants, then you are blessedly illegitimate offspring, too. I hope you will be as unfaithful to me as I have been to our shared cultural ancestors.

I now believe the identity of a “submissive man” is at best of limited use; exuberant, perhaps, but taxonomic rather than expressive. In her succinct deconstruction of Chela Sandoval, Haraway writes:

Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of colour. She notes that the definition of the group has been by conscious appropriation of negation. For example, a Chicana or US black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identities, left out of even the privileged oppressed authorial categories called ‘women and blacks’, who claimed to make the important revolutions. The category ‘woman’ negated all non-white women; ‘black’ negated all non-black people, as well as all black women.

In applying this to myself and the specific microcosm of deliberate erotic megalomania in which I was socialized, it feels a parallel trajectory: A submissive man has heretofore not been able to speak as a man nor as a submissive person. Thus, within The-Scene-as-The-State, his is also an amalgamation of forced-negative identities that inevitably fluctuates along multiple spectra in ways that do not conform to gender role stereotypes. He could be neither submissive nor a man at the same time; his kink is necessarily queer.

I think this holds because The Scene’s “revolutionary authorial” categories are overwhelmingly “submissive women”, while its “privileged” categories are overwhelmingly “dominant men”. So trapped partly by my own self-projection, which by its very literal nature is multifetal since I’m concurrently in my own space as well as volatile and hostile arenas, I constantly experience a maddening multidimensional dissonance. That my dissonance—and my dissidence!—is caused by (specifically categorical) privilege in some contexts and its absence in others is simply another layered irony.

But our broken sexual identities—submissive man, dominant woman, what have you—are not served by having Scene-State figureheads at all; I’ve been documenting entrances when I should’ve been documenting exits! I’m too visible, acrid, and incorporeal to change The Scene, anyway. Perhaps you, my invisible heroes, would be better suited to that task.

Refuge in Diasporic Exile

As June came to a close, I visited Portland to volunteer for a tech conference, and someone who knew me far better than I knew them invited me into their new house, and then I felt a way I didn’t know I could feel again: they caned me, and I loved it. I wanted more, and harder. It was more desirable pain than I’d felt in years, the first time in a long time I’d felt good about playing a way I’d craved for so long.

I wish I had words to describe it, but all I have is this unceremonious picture:

When I look at this photograph, the emotional intensity I recall and the objective inanity I see have me feeling trapped in an endless tug-of-war. “Don’t you get it?” I want to scream at anyone who doesn’t. I want so much more than this momentary banality but this is all I get. This is such a sentimental photograph to me because it shows a moment unfairly difficult to find, something made out of reach, and something I could only touch again for a brief moment. And it is simultaneously such an agonizing photograph to me because it shatters the self-consoling aplomb I had of living my life without it.

Yet I cannot imagine this photo holding any significance to anyone but myself, and perhaps some of the people who care about me. It’s not particularly beautiful or well-lit. It is not retouched or cropped, nor particularly intentionally posed or composed. I am not an especially beautiful model in it—I don’t even know how to be, for a picture—nor are my marks remarkable, even by my own history. There is no way this picture would and, worse, no reason this picture should get any love on FetLife’s Kinky & Popular feed, for instance.

I deeply resent the “privileged shits” who belittle this mundane sacredness, who don’t understand why I’m terrified of publishing this picture in the first place, or why I’m doing it anyway. I’m jealous of others’ sociosexual ease (where they have it), but more so of the cornucopia of sex they inhabit regardless of whether or not the horn of plenty is a mirage; more than anything, I’m jealous of their access to a symbology for signaling desires and boundaries to others. How can I ever hope to feel whole when I can’t express submissiveness for fear of signaling meekness, nor desirous for fear of signaling aggression?

I desperately want to have sex and play and lay with lovers, new and as-yet-undiscovered. I hate The Scene because I cannot kneel and feel confident I am seen for who I am—even in my own bedroom, even, no, especially by my own eyes. This black lung is the ugliest part of me.

Further, a personal irony makes things harder: my Work itself was what made me not only attractive, but noticeable enough to have even the opportunity for such play in the first place. In Portland, in bed, as we laughed together, they whispered in my ear: “I had this idea that playing with you would have to be so serious.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah,” they said. “You’re maymay.”

In other words, when I move through The Scene, I’m no longer one of the dime-a-dozens. I could have a puny hill, too, now, if only I’d wear that contemptible crown. But I don’t want it, even as I know others would love to have it, because breathing the air there tastes like oil.

Recently, FeministSub asked me a poignant question:

do you think the BDSM community is capable of change and do you feel motivated to be one of the people that helps make that happen?

I evaded answering because I was scared to admit the extent of my true feelings publicly: like all governances obsessed with power, this Scene-State is fundamentally callous. It’s not immune to the toxins in general society, it amplifies them—but it’s also the source of vital yet unrefined antiserums for general society. That’s why I can’t find it in myself to light the match, but if I were to witness The Scene ablaze today, I would not move to stop its destruction. Instead, I would watch with bittersweet sensitivity as the closest thing I knew to a cultural home burned. Because maybe, if there is enough fire, eventually there won’t be any flames left to draw me back here at all.

And in my awkward, cataclysmic final fantasy, I’d distill this sentiment to explain why many people far more forgiving, far more generous, and far more compromising than I wrinkle their noses at WIITWD all the time. They’re correct to do so. If my genuine sorrow at that fact is a mystery to a community that declares itself well-versed in reconciling paradoxes, then that community isn’t just self-selective and self-protective, it’s self-delusional.

A Lighthouse in the Park

So, all this being said, here’s what I’ll do: I’m going to the park, and I’m inviting you—yes, you—to join me to hang out for a while. It seems to me that the kind of kink-friendly people I want to meet, as well as the ones who seem to have the things I most want, occupy a liminal space between public Scene and private clique. If a humane cultural home exists for me at all, it exists there, and I need to recenter myself at the permeable edge of that voluntary intersectional diaspora.

I’m going to the park because it’s not Wicked Grounds, or a munch, or a party. You’re still invited if you like those other places, but I want a less polluted environment. After all, “if the only available patterns for kink emphasize something a person doesn’t like, then that person will probably avoid kink.” And that’s who I want to meet; you’re who I really care about, anyway. Even if The Powers That Be don’t believe me, I know there are many of you out there, somewhere.

So, I’m going to the park. And I’m bringing my juggling clubs, and maybe a book in case you don’t show up (that’d be okay, too), and maybe some fruits and berries if I can find fresh ones on the cheap to share, in case you do show up. Because I’ve already spent too much time doing things I didn’t want to. And I deserve to feel fulfilled in every way, but not because I’m special, not because I’m “maymay.” I deserve it because I’m just like you.

I’ll be at Golden Gate Park, at the big lawn in front of the Conservatory of Flowers on Sunday, August 7^th, around 3:30 PM.

When I moved to San Francisco, I was told the city would take me in, that I would be welcome here, that I could fall and the city would catch me. San Francisco: sanctuary for the sexually open. San Francisco: home for wayward queers. San Francisco: Fog City.

In one sense, San Francisco is a fitting place to make my residence. When I walk its hills I (literally) can’t foresee what I’ll encounter at a peak; a street fight, an emergency vehicle, or a gorgeous vista all seem equally likely. When it is foggy, this sense of uncertainty is even more pronounced. But in another sense, San Francisco has been predictably cruel.

A growing solicitude over my prolonged mental isolation keeps me up at night; I hug myself under the covers to remind myself of the sensation. There seems to be an ever-expanding cerebral distance between myself and others, like a great chasm carved with the simple force of circumstance and material. Did the Earth scream in pain when the Grand Canyon was cut into its crust like a wound on its flesh?

The other day I wrote about why BDSM and self-harm can not, using any empirical analysis, be considered similar and the responses I got felt like water cutting through rock; predictable and inevitable and overwhelming and elementarily antithetical to that which they engaged. They are good comments, or would be if attached to a post about coping with a cruel world as a person into BDSM—so, perhaps, a post like this one.

Last Sunday, I spoke with Dr. Staci Newmahr on Kink On Tap about her ethnography of a public SM community. What’s not in the show recording is the exceptionally personal 4 hour conversation Staci and I had after show close. I felt a little like we had (consensually) turned the tables and I was answering, instead of asking, questions. At one point, someone in the chat room asked me how often I play.

“I don’t think I’ve played seriously, in public, for years—in private, for probably about a year. Maybe about a little bit more, at this point,” I answered. Play is—in no metaphorical sense—an expression of intimacy, and my feelings of isolation are as much a result of my difficulty in finding safe, understanding play partners as they are a result of my cerebral dissonance with the BDSM community at large. But it’s worse than that because the BDSM community is, ostensibly, the pool from which a person into BDSM (such as me) can most easily engage play partners. This is a vicious cycle, a catch 22 in which this dissonance—whether on intellectual grounds or, equally likely, a failure to engage with what Staci described as my “sophisticated” gender—precludes playing with others in “the community” as a likely outcome for me.

“What would you do after you’ve given up on having the sex life you want?” I once asked. For many people—and on a personal level, notably submissive men with “sophisticated” gender identities—this is not a hypothetical question. And I am obscenely privileged for having the resources needed to merely identify this reality.

In conversing with Staci, I continued, “playing was cathartic for many people. You know, you discuss in the book people who you interview who talk about playing as something that is very calming and sort of a release of stress and…can be very nice. […Play] was the only tool for emotional self-regulation I had for a very long time, and [now] I’ve sort of had to deal with not having that for a very long time.”

From the moment I can remember claiming my own autonomy (in second grade, actually), my life has been a struggle to hold onto that right for self-determination. It too often seems everything in the world is stacked against me in this: the education system is a corrupted racist prison pipeline; prisons themselves are slave camps for warmongers; the farcical “Land of the Free” is more aptly termed the Land of the Fearful. As I grew, I saw how insidious the enemy is, how it seeps into the tiniest crevices even within myself, if not rushing into places where it once could find no footing.

And they say my generation is apathetic. Well, I won’t believe it. I say we are overwhelmed, for we are the first generation who hear others’ suffering in their own words.

Do you hear them? The billions of voices, all crying out in anguish, every day, again, and again, and again? I can’t stop hearing them. You may say this is all just “a…bit of history repeating,” but I say that doesn’t stop “your hips from swinging.” After all, suicide and revolution are just two sides of the same coin.

Sometime last year, I got a surprise and much-needed affirmation from two out-of-State friends. At the time, I wrote about it privately but didn’t have the guts to publish what I wrote:

It had already been several days since I’d eaten comfortably. Every time I tried, I would get this hideous, nauseous feeling deep in the pit of my stomach. It felt as though the food was toxic. Or maybe I was. But that didn’t stop me from trying.

Dinner, that night, was no different. I had arrived ten minutes late, apologized, and ordered mushroom soup. I tried making small talk while the soup cooled in front of me. It didn’t work.

“Why don’t you tell us what’s bothering you?” [She] asked.

“You can’t dodge it forever,” [the other] added.

I deflected, again, with a joke.

[…]

“You don’t want to hear me rant,” I offered. But neither [of them] wanted to let it go. They no doubt saw how hurt I felt.

Yet another potential friend whom I knew for too short a time, the opportunities with whom were stolen by distance. And by New York, to boot. And by that group. That xenophobic group.

So I told them after all. I told them of the struggle to work on Kink On Tap, on KinkForAll. How important those projects are to me, and to others. And I told them why. I told them about spaces, and how I had none. Have none. Still. How I’d given up having spaces.

[…]

I don’t get to have a space made for me, but maybe I’ll be able to make a space for someone else. So I have to.

[…]

I was crying now, as I explained why I cared so much. The anger gave way to the sadness as the story turned from facts to feelings. “They don’t HAVE to care as much,” I said between tears, “because they HAVE a space, with each other, in their own insular group. So they don’t have to care as hard as I do, and I get that. I get that they have 9-5′s, that they’re not always working on making this culture better every waking moment. But I am, because I have to, because I don’t have a space like that, and I don’t even want one for me anymore. All I want now is help. Somebody to help me make a place where someone like me 8 years ago could go and wouldn’t suffer the way I did back then. Because I REMEMBER the pain, I REMEMBER what it felt like to be so alone, and so I can’t not care this hard, this much, even if they can.”

[…]

They were both done with their meals. I hardly touched mine. I didn’t feel hungry. I had spoken all through dinner, and apologized for monopolizing the conversation, and for being a downer. They said it was all right, that they wanted to have dinner with me. They asked if they could take care of me tonight. I hesitantly agreed.

[…]

With no sign that I had overstayed my welcome and in such soothing company, I walked with them to their hotel room. They gave me a spare key on the elevator, “just in case.” Indoors, eventually, awkwardly, the conversation drifted towards play. They told me they’d wanted to play, if I was interested. I was, and I was scared to—it had been so very long—and I said as much. They offered me cuddles, to start, and I graciously accepted.

We talked about mostly inconsequential things some more on the bed, slowly removing bits of one another’s clothing as we got more comfortable. I was surprised at my level of comfort with them. Soon we were playing, and kissing. [One] held my arms behind my back and touched her lips to my neck. [The other] squeezed my nipples and nibbled at my chest and raked her knife across my body.

“It feels so good to touch and be touched,” I said, remarking on the plain catharsis. It was void of romance or deep love, but it was just as necessary and just as healing and for which I was just as grateful.

The night was magical in that when the darkness of the evening finally enveloped us on the bed, there was nothing else in the world. No billions of others in anguish. No spaces needed to be made or unmade. Just us. For the first night in a long time, I rested in peace.

I desperately needed that; it is so healthy and I, like so many others, get it so rarely. Sexuality communities talk a good game about acceptance but they don’t do it so well in the face of this enemy, for it is far more deeply rooted even here than they are aware. And because they are not aware, because they are often willfully unaware, they are, themselves, oppressive.

And for me, since many of my own personal wounds were themselves created by the sexuality communities’ ignorance, every time I write or speak about this issue—and, yes, every time I so much as try to flirt, far less actually have sex or play with someone—I am picking at scabs. On multiple levels, I live in a mad world:

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere

Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I wanna drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow

And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it's a very, very
Mad world, mad world

Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy birthday, happy birthday
And I feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen

Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher tell me, what's my lesson?
Look right through me, look right through me

And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles its a very, very
Mad world, mad world, enlarging your world
Mad world

I understand that BDSM play can be—and, for some, is—an internal process, an emotional “self-medication.” I don’t think playing from that place, or drinking from that place, or doing whatever the fuck it is that you do from that place is wrong if it keeps you alive. Because, as far as I’m concerned, as long as you aren’t imposing your will on others or violating others’ physical and emotional boundaries, you get to do whatever you need to do to stay alive.

This is a cruel world. The BDSM community is no less cruel—not to me, and not to thousands upon thousands of others. So stop saying you are. Stop it. Please stop, because you’re hurting me, and I didn’t consent to this.

Suddenly, the publish button on my blog no longer represented mere readers, but a malevolent and tumultuous world filled with people willing and able to hurt me personally, professionally, and—at least in theory—physically. Rather than write and publish, I retreated to the safety of first, second, and third drafts, followed by an editorial review, and yet more drafts. Publication became an act of resistance, not merely an act of literary vulnerability.

My previous process was possible only because I had the people-power to support it: smart friends willing to hold me to my own standards of critical thinking and intellectual integrity. Conversation constituted the conceptual drafting of arguments, which were refined through additional private discourse until a short essay-like post—still in my own, often harshly, unapologetically and painfully embittered words—was produced. I was at times, and may sometimes still be, wrong-headed in my assertions, but I had enough safety in my relative obscurity to explore the theoretical terrain I had ventured into.

When the pain we were in forced my confidants and I to cease communicating regularly, I didn’t know what to do with myself. In some areas of my life, I still don’t. But I did figure out how to keep thinking, and how to keep writing:

1. Externalize my internal monologue by posting copiously to Twitter (via my own site, for data portability and anti-censorship purposes; more on that in March).
2. See what sticks, either because I keep talking about it or others pick up on something I’ve said.
3. Collect bits of related material in more postings or on a public scratchpad, such as my Tumblr blog. Sometimes this is all that was needed, as the collecting of material resulted in a post here on its own.
4. Write a long-form that connects the dots between these multiple pieces of disparate but related material, first in a draft that’s shared with a trusted few if I’m feeling scared, unsure, or lack confidence, then more publicly.

I like the thoroughness and academic rigor this process brings to my writing. But, I am lonely. This process does little to ease my emotional state, even while it hones my intellect. Direct human influence through conversation—the intellectual equivalent of touch—is replaced by the (sometimes literally) filtered thoughts squeezed through the cold, narrow distance of the Internet. And I miss being touched in all the ways that word implies.

I am trying to recapture some of the utility that spontaneity, that sharing first drafts, can bring. I did not spend much time analyzing this post for how I can be attacked for writing it, although I know I can be even as I acknowledge that this particular meta-reflection is less susceptible to attacks than other thoughts are, and so I am risking less hitting the publish button now than I may risk in the future. But I feel fragile and weak and, despite my purported prolificity, I often feel stressed like a bowed wooden plank under the weight of an immense load.

I would like to finally leave the safer confines of thoroughly well thought out posts. I wish I had a more reliable network of confidants with whom I was able to converse face-to-face frequently and consistently and who pushed the bounds of my thinking in doing so—but I don’t. And so I guess if there’s any point in writing this post at all, I’m writing it to ask you to touch my mind in the same way as you, dear reader, are letting me touch yours.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do it—this was not the post I sat down to write when I sat down some minutes ago to write. But what better post in which to ask for such a thing than a post for which I did not write a second draft?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncertain future

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

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

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

Watch on Ustream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those who oppose our most basic rights are not, as many would have the public believe, just well-meaning, ordinary citizens. They are calculating opportunists who operate at the highest levels of academia and government, influencing policy and opinion to the advancement of their personal and political agendas—at our expense.

The cost of inaction is your sexual freedom, the ability to exercise your rights to love whom and how you choose, to control not only your own life but how you make life. That freedom is stolen by a threat used against anyone who dares say something that opposes or exposes sex-negative interests for the shame they are, as former US Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders and countless others can testify. That threat, in the hands of the sex-negative and the hateful, goes something like this: “If you question us, then you’re a child molester, a sexual predator, a rapist, and/or an enabler of those horrors.”

These people have two primary weapons, fear and obfuscation, which they use to pass unjust laws and attack political opponents. And they wield these weapons masterfully. As Melissa Ditmore, Ph.D., wrote (in 2008!) of the worrisome increase in panic-driven legislation, in this case legislation addressing sex work:

Sex law is often a front for ideology that constrains rather than liberates women. What most appalls me about the recent conflation of trafficking and sex work in law and policy is that some feminists support the confusion. These women would normally never dream of telling other women how to behave, because they have fought against imposed constraints in their own lives. Yet they seem to think it is acceptable to tell sex workers what is best for them, and they are prepared to use dubious political alliances to advance their moral agenda.

Only when the whole truth and nothing but the truth is laid bare, evidence reveals these “concerned citizens” as the hypocritical ideologues they are. Even the recent ruling overturning “Proposition Hate” explicitly recognizes this: The Protect Marriage campaign advertisements ensured California voters had these previous fear-inducing messages in mind. The evidence at trial shows those fears to be completely unfounded. (Emphasis mine.)

So watch the media closely, and critically. Your freedoms and your future need you now. As Driftglass said on Kink On Tap 52, First of all, a robust and powerful investigative media is necessary to a democracy. And secondly, citizens have to take responsibility for knowing shit and getting angry about shit and then taking action about it.

That’s why I’ve been reading FBI complaints, government press releases, news archives, and a host of other documents in order to learn all I can about how hateful people with political influence operate. And if I don’t share what I know, fewer people will be equipped to take action. So, very soon, I will share, because as Jacob Applebaum said, People in the United States of America have the ability to democratically change this situation if they are unhappy with the truth; they now have information that will assist them in having a clearer picture. Perhaps they will demand more transparency and more accountability.

I’m angry because we live in a world where we’re made to feel afraid of our own bodies, and of touching our bodies, and of other peoples’ bodies, and touching them, and of other people’s bodies touching. These things should be beautiful, but because some people aren’t comfortable with them, nobody is allowed to be.

I am angry because parents are made to distrust their own children, children are made to feel like—and even prosecuted as—criminals, and when a woman respected enough to become the Surgeon General of the United States said that maybe, just maybe, if we don’t frighten kids away from masturbating they’d be more knowledgeable and responsible about sexuality, she lost her job. And this sex-negative culture is so strong, now it may even pervade the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists—the people who are supposed to teach us about sex and our bodies.

And I’m angry because I feel like I can’t make myself heard, and because too few others are speaking up. I’m angry because if you do speak up, you’ll get attacked. You’ll be accused of terrible things, like being a child molester, or enabling rape.

I’m not angry because I was attacked, I’m angry because anyone could be, at any time, and nobody will even bother to watch the whole video before passing judgment. And everybody just accepts this, as though it’s natural for the world to be like this. But it isn’t natural—our culture was manufactured this way.

We could all trust a little more, and panic a little less, and everything would be so much better. But I can’t make that happen, and I can’t make people listen to me. Even if people wanted to listen, they’d have a hard time because other people make sure you can’t read what I write or hear what I say in spaces like public libraries. But most people won’t even try, simply too afraid that they’ll be viewed as dirty, porn-loving perverts.

So I’m isolated, and I’m angry. But the one thing I refuse to be is quiet. Because this culture is telling us we’re supposed to be afraid, and silent, and “decent.” And if I buy that, then I’ll be just as hollow as the lip service this fear-based culture pays to honesty.

Acting on what you believe in is an easy thing to do. At first.

But then mean, angry, or frightened people insinuate nasty behavior on your part, misquote you seemingly on purpose, and paint you out to be a nightmarish creature. A sex slaver. A child molester. They’ll call you or what you do slimy, putrid, decaying, nasty, trash.

Or at least, they might if you were me, what you believed in was that everyone on Earth deserves the capability to access public discussions about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life, and they were the (rather inappropriately named for this particular initiative of theirs) Initiative Against Sexual Trafficking, a branch of the Salvation Army, or its mailing list subscribers.

Yesterday, I learned that the Salvation Army apparently sent out an email blast that, among other things, seems to have viscously attacked KinkForAll as an idea and, beyond inappropriate, attacked me personally. At a minimum, they evidently incited at least one blogger to name me a pedophile and to say things like the following:

Today I got a message from the chairperson of the Initiative Against Sexual Trafficking, an arm of the Salvation Army. […] As part of their mailing list, I receive information on legislation, programming, etc. as a way of becoming informed about the issue.

Well, I’d rather not have been informed about the following issue. I share it with you as a way of expressing deep sorrow.

[…]

KinkforAll, an “organization” begun by middle-school drop-out ["maymay"], recently sponsored an event on the Brown University campus in Providence, Rhode Island.

[…]

["maymay"] is, quite simply, nothing short of a pedophile […] I really believe that this ["maymay"] character has one of the sickest, darkest minds that I’ve ever heard of. […] All that matters to him are his own dark kicks.

How dare he? More importantly, how dare we? Where is the rage for what this man is trying to do to our children? Where are the prosecutors, working to toss him behind bars?

It goes on quite a ways, and there’s no link love for obvious reasons. You can Google for the source if you’d like; it’s not hard. Obviously, I’d be very interested to read the email that incited this post, but I’m not subscribed to their mailing list and I can’t figure out how to get on the mailing list or view their archives from their web site. (I’d give them an F on their transparency report card if I were grading.)

To this particular blogger’s credit (her name is Marie, and she is “completely in love with Jesus,” according to her blog’s “about” page), she took a deep breath and, in a followup post earlier today, retracted her accusations. She writes:

it was wrong of me to liken ["maymay"] to a pedophile. I can’t say that. I don’t know that.

[…]

As I was writing the piece, it began, in my mind, as a factual presentation, and then devolved into an emotional scream. I had a name that I could latch on to, as way of being able to pin all the blame on someone for something that makes me hurt. See, it’s really easy to cross that line between judging an action and judging a person. The problem, to me, is a whole lot bigger than this one person or his personal opinions.

So, I’m not ashamed to say that that was wrong and that I’m sorry, both to you who might read this blog and to ["maymay"] himself. That wasn’t careful writing, nor was it me at my best. Actually, I was engaging in the kind of writing that I feel very strongly that I’m not supposed to do.

I’m impressed with the personal integrity Marie has shown in her second post. Sadly, that’s very often lacking in people and so it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that the hateful sentiments Marie expressed in her first post are not unique to her. That’s a frightening thought.

Let me be plain. It is fucking terrifying to be publicly slandered by people you don’t know, who fail to get their facts correct about you or your actions, who are incited by a faceless, nameless insinuator that refuses to engage with you. It’s enraging to be accused of doing the very things you want to prevent. These Salvation Army people scare me.

I am scared, and I am angry. But, y’know what?

Being scared and angry isn’t mutually exclusive with standing up for what you believe in. So I’m going to stand up and dare to say that access to education, including accurate, rational, and non-judgemental sexuality information, is a fundamental human right, that everyone on Earth deserves to have their human rights met from the moment they are born, and for that reason it is important that everyone’s right to access educational resources they’ve demonstrated intent to access is upheld. Period.

I think it’s tragic that people who ostensibly want to do such good in the world, like Marie and even more like the authors of that defaming email, end up doing such awful things. But nothing in our lives is forever changeless, so when I saw the second breath that Marie took, I risked a blog comment. Following, in case it doesn’t get approved on Marie’s blog, is the comment I submitted in full.

As you read it, regardless of who you are, please ask yourself this one simple question: What can I do in this situation that will enable other people to live, learn, and be joyous? The answer to your question is how you will empower others. Now your job is to find a way to keep that happening without you, because only when your presence is no longer required have you actually succeeded in self-empowering others.

Hi Marie,

In your comment above, you poignantly wrote some words I agree with. Specifically, you said:

I look around me, at women specifically, and I don’t see the promised liberation. I see girls getting pregnant at 14. I see women starving themselves or getting all sorts of surgery in order to be “beautiful.” I see wives reduced to playing porn in the bedroom, because their husbands aren’t aroused without it. That’s what makes me uncomfortable and sad. I believe that women are absolutely equal to men[…].

I still see a lot of this too, and it angers me, too. (Did you know that potentially unsafe labia dye products are on the market? Sigh.) It angers me because the reality you described with those words actively hurts me, just as much as it hurts millions of other men (although too few of my fellow men seem to understand this) and it hurts women, and it hurts children. I’m working very hard in the way I know best to eradicate sexual misinformation, shaming, and abuse. With respect to our goals as I understand yours from your quote, above, I don’t see a very big difference between us. :)

You mentioned that you’re going to keep your previous post up. If you’re going to do that, then I’d appreciate the opportunity to address some statements you wrote as “factual presentation” but are, in fact, incorrect.

First, you wrote:

KinkForAll […] recently sponsored an event on the Brown University campus in Providence, Rhode Island.

To be precise, it was the Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council (SHEEC), a student group at Brown University, that sponsored the KinkForAll Providence unconference. Neither KinkForAll nor Brown University were sponsoring the event. You can learn more about SHEEC from their web site.

Second, you wrote:

The specific goal of the event was to foster an acceptance of bondage, discipline and sadomasochism – as well as promoting an “anything goes” attitude.

In reality, I have personally loudly spoken out that the goal of KinkForAll events should never be specific to an acceptance of bondage, discipline and sadomasochism. The true goal of KinkForAll unconferences are to inspire conversations about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life. (Consider reading the short “KinkForAll” about page, if you haven’t yet.)

“The intersection of sexuality with the rest of life” covers a lot of ground, and has included things like healthy cooking and eating (at KinkForAll New York City 2), free speech and privacy technologies (at KinkForAll San Francisco), and a host of other topics, but for some reason people like the folks at the Salvation Army seem particularly excited to spotlight discussions about consensual sadomasochism. Moreover, they say those topics are my focus, when they have never been my focus at KinkForAll unconferences at all. That’s very misleading and I find it small of them to show such carelessness in misrepresenting me so blatantly.

Have you considered the possibility that some of these people are conjuring some demons from their own fears, rather than from reality?

Third, you wrote:

Each person attending the event was required to participate in the many discussion panels

That’s not true, either. Participation can include speaking up in discussion panels if one so chooses, but it can also mean helping put out chairs, bringing home cooked food (pot-luck lunch is yummier than catered food!), taking out the trash, or just sitting in and listening or taking notes or something. Really, we have a whole page with suggestions of how to participate; the unconferences are expressly designed as open to the public spaces where people can feel physically safe and free to abstain from anything they’re not up to doing. :)

Fourth, you wrote:

["maymay"] insisted to school officials – both at Brown and on other campuses where he has been allowed to hold events – that children be allowed to attend. [… He] claims to find it “heartwarming” that at least one minor has been officially recorded as having attended one of the events in New York. […] Responding to a hypothetical question about what he would do should a nine-year-old child show up at a KinkforAll, ["maymay"] wrote that he would hold this child to be “amazing” and would help him get connected with the group.

I’ve actually never spoken to school officials about KinkForAll so, again, I question the reliability of your source. Also, I think the minor you’re referring to who has been “officially recorded” was a local high school student in Washington, D.C., not New York City. I found it “heartwarming” that she chose to lead a discussion about being in high school and working with school administrators on sexuality issues at school. Again, you might do well to follow up with whatever your source is, since your information seems littered with errors.

As for the “amazing” quote—a quote of one word—you attribute to me, what you’re likely referring to were the conversations I had with fellow event planners where I insisted that an “open to the public” event, like KinkForAll unconferences are, should by definition not restrict the ability of anyone who shows an informed intent to participate from doing so, regardless of race, religious belief, or age. It would be amazing if young people were empowered to be free of coercion about what they should or should not do, want, or think. Perhaps that way, for instance, young girls won’t be swayed to purchase labia dye by the very industry that profits from inflicting them with a poor self-image, y’know?

By the way, all these conversations between KinkForAll participants (not “members,” since there is no such thing as KinkForAll membership), including the one you used a one-word quote of me in, are all publicly visible. Rather than get yourself worked up on factually questionable or severely sensationalistic material, I invite you to read the conversations I have about this yourself. I’m actually relatively boring if you’re willing to listen before you pass judgement. :)

On a personal note:

When you likened me to the things I revile, you hurt me deeply (wouldn’t that hurt you?), so I thank you for your apology, and I gratefully accept it. I urge you to consider the possibility that you were not the only person who was incited to an “emotional scream” from reading whatever it is you read about me, although perhaps you are one of a fewer number with enough integrity to retract a personal attack after making it.

With that in mind, I hope that when you see others so eager to cast blame and throw stones based on what they think they “know,” as you almost did, that you stand up with a calm, brilliant voice of reason and remind everyone involved to take a deep breath. That would be truly heroic.

Again, if you’re going to leave the previous post up, it would be heartwarming if you could at least include a link to the sources that incited your remarks as well as a link to this post (or even directly to this comment), so that you empower future readers of your blog to follow the trail themselves instead of taking solely my word or yours on the issue. Give a man a fish versus teach a man to fish, and all that; enabling your readers to make up their own minds about the issue by providing links to source material would be grand. :)

Anyway, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for considering me in a less furor-driven light this second time around. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you’d be interested in having a more in-depth dialogue. I’m very easy to find online, and I’d welcome your voice in whatever conversations I have in public spaces.

Cheers,
-["maymay"] :)

Update (March 25, 2010): This morning I awoke to find that my comment on Marie’s post was published and a rather thoughtful reply was left. I think it’s so worthwhile that I’m going to republish it here, along with my as-yet-unapproved reply to her reply (which I’m thinking will be the last in the thread from me for now).

["maymay"],

Thank you for your reply.

First, I would post a link to the source whence I garnered this information, but it came to me in an email format, which I have sense deleted. (I’m rather fanatical about clearing my inbox.) I have attempted to find the article online, but have been unsuccessful thus far.

I did actually read most of the information on the KinkforAll site. I can, in one sense, appreciate that you and others desire to see people educated on the topic of sex and sexuality. Realistically, I think that this is something that everyone, on all sides of the topic, can agree upon. I, for one, when I have children, would like to see them be comfortable with the fact that they are sexual beings.

However, I son’t think what we have deemed as “education,” on whatever end of the spectrum, really IS education. I don’t think it’s enough to tell someone, “Don’t have sex” without telling them why that’s a good idea, and nor do I think it’s enough to say, “Do what you want” without addressing the pitfalls.

As I said before, I’m not a perfect person, and I do realize that what I wrote was littered with ranting toward you, which I am sorry for. On my end, I just feel incredibly frustrated. After accepting the grace so freely offered my by Christ, I began to see very clearly that all the things I’d been told about sex – again, on whatever end of the spectrum – had quite clearly missed the point. “Don’t do it” with not explanation leads to rebellion or shaming. “Do whatever” leads to heartbreak. That has been my experience.

I think that we are sexual beings, yes. This means that our sexuality is part of everything – body, mind, heart, soul. I don’t think we can separate, hard as we might try, the one from the other. I think we have done ourselves a great disservice in trying, and in taking sex from the private sphere and injecting it into the public.

I don’t mean having honest discussions about sex and sexuality in a safe environment. Frankly, I also think this issue has a lot to with a lack of personal responsibility regarding parenting. Children shouldn’t be left to the devices of the world around them to learn about sex. What I do mean is the constant bombardment of images, messages, etc. about how to do it, when to do it, how to look when you do it, what’s good, what’s bad, and so on. I feel that KinkforAll has contributed to this barrage. That’s likely something that we’ll just have disagree on.

Again, sir, thank you for your comment.

My reply to Marie’s comment follows:

Hi Marie,

More briefly than my last comment, as I don’t want to overstay my welcome on your blog, let me just say that I can wholeheartedly understand the frustration you describe because I feel a lot of it, too. As an aside, one of the things that helped me start thinking about why everything I was told was so off-point was this essay by Dr. Marty Klein, called “Censorship and the Fear of Sexuality.” I highly recommend it.

I began to see very clearly that all the things I’d been told about sex – again, on whatever end of the spectrum – had quite clearly missed the point.

Exactly. EXACTLY. I’m so glad to hear you say that because I agree completely. As hard as it might be to believe, my involvement with the KinkForAll unconferences were born out of my desire to see my “end of the spectrum” do a better job of actually educating about sex and relationships.

I think we have done ourselves a great disservice in trying, and in taking sex from the private sphere and injecting it into the public.

I don’t mean having honest discussions about sex and sexuality in a safe environment.

May I ask, then, what do you mean? And also, what do you think “inspiring conversations about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life” refers to at KinkForAll unconferences, which expressly and strictly disallow sexualized acts, if not, y’know, having honest discussions about sex and sexuality in a safe environment? Maybe what some people are imagining isn’t what happens there and maybe watching some of the many video recordings from KinkForAll unconferences would better arm you with knowledge than reading text on a web site, even the KinkForAll web site. (In light of our conversation about “what we’re told about sex,” I would recommend this talk: On Dichotomies That (No Longer) Jail Me.)

In other words, I am generally of the opinion that to think freely, we have to be able to speak freely. The solution to “bad speech” is never censorship, but rather more speech. That’s why I’m so frightened by the attacks the Salvation Army has made or incited from well-meaning people like you, and possibly others still to come; those sentiments don’t inspire conversation, they incite violence whether physical or emotional and they absolutely, definitely, shut down the opportunity for honest dialogue.

Anyway, yeah, that’s why I don’t understand the vitriol with which the Salvation Army has attacked me, and why I’m frightened that there are so many people less civilly mannered than you. I hope, of course, that you’ll help inspire conversation and civil behavior when you see the opposite happening.

Thanks also for trying to find the source you quoted. If you ever do find it, I’d be happy to see it linked on these blog posts. And of course, you know where to reach me; consider my door always open to you. Always.

Although Marie can’t find the source, I did learn that on March 20^th, two people by the names of Margaret Brooks and Donna M. Hughes published a defaming bulletin about me that cites KinkForAll Providence heavily, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that these are the same alarmists I referred to before. The bulletin is on a web site misnamed Citizens Against Trafficking. It should, at least in this instance, be called “Citizens Against Sexuality Freedom and Discussion.” (I move to rename and will from here on out refer to the group as CASFD. Again, no link love. You can find it with Google.)

To Margaret Brooks and Donna M. Hughes: I personally invite you to speak with me by replying to this post or the Open Thread I posted a while back. That invitation stands at least until before you call me “dangerous to the community” or publish similar sentiments a second time.

To provide a bit of context for those that don’t know, these are the same people who barricaded Megan Andelloux, also named in the bulletin, from opening The Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health a few months back. Megan presented a talk about the issues surrounding the opening for The Center at KinkForAll Providence, which I encourage everyone to watch, below.

Sex Panic in Pawtucket – KinkForAll Providence from maymay on Vimeo.

When Megan Andelloux wanted to open the Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health in Pawtucket, RI, “freaked out” residents barricaded her opening for 5 months and the local police threatened to arrest her. At KinkForAll Providence, 1 week after Megan’s education center opened, she gives a talk about the “sex panic” that swept the state and captured national headlines. Megan tells of a University of Rhode Island professor who waged a “war” to stop her from educating adults about sex, how locals demanded that “we should outlaw sex!” and how she fought for your sexual freedoms—and won! Learn more about Megan Andelloux at http://OhMegan.com and about the Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health at http://TheCSPH.org

Update (March 25^th, 2010): Marie took down her original post today. To wit, she wrote:

I have decided to remove the original piece that I posted here, and encourage those of you who may read this blog to peruse the above listed article for yourselves, as well as doing other research.

The “above listed article” Marie linked to is the bulletin published by the Citizens Against Sexuality Freedom and Discussion (CASFD), that I mentioned earlier. This confirms my suspicions about the sources of these attacks. Again, I challenge Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks (shown below) to actually reply to this Open Thread.

Margaret Brooks

Donna M. Hughes

As an aside, I do wonder why “Margaret Brooks” is much more easily findable on Google as “Margaret Landman.” Perhaps ‘Landman’ is a maiden name. Or a pseudonym. You can Google for these people as well; that’s how I found the pictures.

Update (March 27^th, 2010): Those following this conversation may find my next blog post, titled Addressing Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks’ concerns over KinkForAll unconferences, worth reading.