As I’m wont to do, my article explores the intersection of gender, sexuality and technology. Since this topic is so broad, the strict word limit was a real challenge. But I like such intellectual challenges. The following is a reprint of my contribution, but don’t let the fact that you’re reading my piece here stop you from exploring SsexBbox’s new mini-blog/online magazine and its other intriguing contributions.

Gender is a text field, by maymay

In one hand, as developmental psychologist Gertrude Wyatt once remarked, the “symbolic transformation of bits of reality into language [is] part and parcel of the individual’s ego development.” If we can accept that, then finding our own words is more than merely good communication, it’s literally necessary for growing up human. There is no more universal human experience than that of describing one’s own identity.

In the other, as “wrongologist” Kathryn Shulz said, “the miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is. It’s that you can see the world as it isn’t.” This is no more profoundly expressed than through our species’ incredible use of technology, the force of which transforms the impossible into the possible. We have reached a point where arguably the most fundamental of God’s gifts to humankind—words—have come full circle.

It is now our words, in the form of programming languages, that are driving the evolution of technology. The corpus of this technological literature changes our physical reality, offering us everything from hormone therapies to space shuttles to online social networks. And as new technologies are developed, technology itself mimics its creator.

Except, that is, in at least one very crucial arena: the description of ourselves. To our technology, our genders are among our most baffling human properties. The binary coarseness with which our technology encodes this information should serve as a humbling reminder to anyone arrogantly proclaiming humanity’s superior intelligence; if your laptop’s screen can display millions of colors, why can your Facebook profile only display one of two options for gender?

Today’s standard for such things is defined in the International Organization for Standardization’s specification titled “Information technology — Codes for the representation of human sexes,” referred to as ISO 5218. This worldwide standard, most recently updated in July 2004, defines 4 mutually exclusive options: “male”, “female”, “not known”, and “not applicable”. It’s a simple scheme that takes a total of 2 computer bits to record.

That’s woefully inadequate—and we can do better. But how?

One early attempt called “Yay! Genderform” offers you 947 options using checkboxes, which allows you to combine each option with any other option for “a total of 1.1896×10285 or 1.1 quattruornovemgintillion possible combinations, more than there are elementary particles in the universe. If each option were a computer bit, it would take 119 bytes to encode a combination.” Though a good illustration of the problem space, staring at an interface of 947 possible boxes to check isn’t merely practically unusable, it fails to free us from the flawed paradigm’s constraints: we need to break out of boxes altogether.

A simple interface can be a gateway to endless possibilities. Take, for example, Google’s famously simple homepage; using just a single text field, Google gives you access to the entire searchable Internet. So, too, can a text field access the symbolic gender galaxy—or at least a coordinate within it.

The words we use to communicate are the tools with which we teach each other—and our software—about ourselves, who we are, who we like, and why. Designing sexist systems might sound brain-dead, but it’s actually how many people think of gender issues in their mind. They quite literally don’t see different humans as being equal; when two men marry, they need to figure out “which is the wife” and so they literally imbue the code they write, and the technology they build, with rigidly gendered, technically inaccurate world views.

Ultimately, it’s up to us to build a world where we can either limit or accept the possibilities of the people we interact with. Therefore, we ought remember Internet pioneer Jon Postel’s Law: “be liberal in what you accept.” Put another way: don’t limit us with boxes, because, as Eddie Izzard said, “there’s gonna be a lot more guys with makeup during this millennium!”

Formerly a professional web developer, maymay is now a social justice technologist whose work primarily intersects with issues of digital civil liberties and sexual freedom. He is the co-author of Foundation Website Creation and AdvancED CSS, the founder of the sexuality education conference series KinkForAll.org, and host of the KinkOnTap.com Internet radio talk show. His seminars on technology and sexuality have been featured at conferences from coast to coast, and he prefers couches to hotel rooms. Learn more at maybemaimed.com/cv.

As usual, please feel free to republish this article at your whim, so long as you don’t do it in any place that requires a financial commercial transaction to access (unless you get permission for that, first), and so long as you link back here. Thanks very much.

if we can accept that the porn that naturally appeals to submissive men is images of men being submissive, couldn’t the porn that naturally appeals to sexual women be of women being sexual? An image doesn’t need to be from the perspective of its intended audience to be “hot,” it can also be from the perspective of that audience’s object of desire and that can make it “hot.”

This comment got me thinking. Even after I responded to Kay in the comment thread, I kept thinking about it. I thought about it so much that I did some Google searching and some blog surfing trying to see if anyone else had ever had the sorts of thoughts I was suddenly having, but I couldn’t find anything relevant.

So, in light of the absence of something to link to, I want to share some of what’s in my head.

On Porn’s “Right Stuff”

Let’s begin with a question: what determines one’s satisfaction with some specific pornographic content?

When I think about why I enjoy some porn and not some other porn, a few obvious things jump out at me. Everyone I’ve asked who’s willing to answer the question also seems able to identify particulars of porn they like that contributes to their enjoyment. They may be physically attracted to the models in visual works, they may enjoy the character development in an erotic story, or they may find the depicted circumstance an exciting prospect to one day explore themselves. Often, one’s distaste for or affinity with a single pornographic image, story, or other artifact is most adequately explained by a combination of these and other factors.

Although details vary between individuals, one observation seems universal: everyone likes some porn, and dislikes some other porn. No one seems to like all porn, though many people certainly have less discriminating tastes than others. At the same time, no one seems to dislike all porn, either.¹

Some data on people’s enjoyment of porn is easy to find, although most of it is necessarily self-reported and anecdotal.² Take the headline poster from the original set of 12 Lady Porn Day flyers, as an example. I described this image as “A skinny white woman wearing nothing but a white fur-lined coat with big blonde hair and big glasses baring it all in a public venue.”

Personally, I find the woman attractive, both aesthetically and sexually. I think she’s beautiful (even though I think she’s dangerously close to hitting the unattractively too-skinny point for my tastes) and I think she’s rockin’ obvious sex appeal. To put it crudely, yes, I’d do her. However, I’m not particularly drawn to the image in general and I’m especially disinterested as a pornography consumer; there is little beyond the aforementioned aesthetic and sexual attraction that holds my interest.

Some might argue that aesthetic and sexual attraction of this sort is what defines “good porn.” The traditional pornographer’s formula seems to be:

1. find conventionally pretty people who fit contemporary standards of human physical aesthetics (e.g., “skinny white women”),
2. place them in sexually suggestive or overtly sexual situations (e.g., “baring it all in a public venue”), and
3. voila: good porn!

The assertion Rabbit, Lady Porn Day’s host, made that images like this one are “things I find hot” may at first suggest this formula is fool-proof. But if this were such an open-and-shut case, why did the same image get the following response from Beka?

You know, even as a lady who enjoys the other ladies, I… don’t really find those images all that arousing. I mean, obviously, it’s a matter of personal preference[…].

The image got an even more severe response from Remittance Girl:³

if I wanted lesbian porn, I’d go find it. The bottom line is, what makes people think women only get turned on by, primarily, other women’s bodies? I want porn that shows males […] I want pictures of hetero men, naked, aroused. Period.

Rabbit, Beka, Remittance Girl, and I each had differing responses to the image. If all it took for porn to be considered “good” were conventionally attractive models in sexual situations, all of us should have found this image “hot.” That (obviously incorrect) formulation divorces the viewer from judging the quality of the porn, yet we intuitively understand that pornography is theatrical; it is not only intended to be viewed, it is interpreted by the viewer, as all classes of art are. Therefore, we must consider the viewer’s perception in determining the quality of any given pornographic artifact. Nowhere is the phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” more applicable than in the study of art—or porn.

If we just factored in the sexual orientation of the viewer, then the only classes of people who we’d expect not to find that picture hot are (exclusively) gay men and (exclusively) straight women. However, plenty of (admittedly anecdotal) evidence suggests that there are many straight women who are aroused by sexualized imagery of women and would agree such images of other women are “hot.”⁴ Clearly, what makes good porn “good” and bad porn “bad” is a complex topic.

Perhaps an understanding of the issues at hand can not be achieved through expositions of a purely sexual nature, but rather through a semiotic study of the viewing of the material. Otherwise, it should have been easier to find porn that is universally liked (or disliked). In other words, for you to understand why a person likes some porn but not some other porn, you must first understand the significance they place on the porn itself.

Sexual gazing: Objectifying to Embodying

In sexuality theories, discourses on gaze mingle with cinematic theory (i.e., media studies, specifically feminist film theory), which is where the notion of the male gaze first appeared. Put simply, a gaze identifies a viewer, or a gazer. When a woman’s curves linger on-screen, as they so often do in cinema, or when a picture of, say, a “skinny white woman…baring it all” is shown, as it so often is in pornography, the viewer is commonly—and often rightly—assumed to be a heterosexual male.⁵

However, this conceptualization of gaze is limiting. Knowing who the gazer is tells us very little about how they are gazing. Part of understanding a person’s pornographic tastes relies on understanding whether their gaze is objectifying or embodying. An objectifying gaze is one in which the gazer—the consumer of the pornographic artifact—imagines themselves as observing the model in a pornographic image, while an embodying gaze is one in which they imagine themselves as being the model.

The gazing behavior a consumer of pornography exhibits can be conceived of as a gaze orientation, similar to a sexual orientation. In 1948, the Kinsey scale⁶ graded sexual behavior along an ordered series of points from exclusively heterosexual (0) to exclusively homosexual (6). The grades numbered 1 through 5 represented the various degrees of bisexual behavior:

Imagine a similar scale as Kinsey’s, except instead of sexual orientation, we’re charting gaze orientation. We can call it the gaze scale.

On one end of the scale, just like sexual orientation, we place hetero-gazing (or, using more cinematic and less sexological terminology, subject-identifying) behavior (0) and on the other we place homo-gazing (or, object-identifying) behavior (6), with bi-gazing behavior in between. As the etymological prefixes imply, hetero-gazing/subject-identifying behavior indicates a preference for the viewed object to be different from the gazer, while homo-gazing/object-identifying behavior indicates a preference for the viewed object to be the same (or at least similar in respect to sociosexual makeup) as the gazer.⁷

As a framework for discussing the subjective satisfaction someone may experience from consuming porn, adding this sociosexual concept to the way we think neatly explains differing reactions to pornographic artifacts that can’t be articulated any other way. Since a person’s gaze orientation is a distinct facet of their sociosexual makeup, any given homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, or asexual person can be any given degree of homo-gazing, bi-gazing, hetero-gazing, or non-gazing (a-gazing?).

For example, some straight women may enjoy stereotypical mainstream porn because they “identify with”⁸ the woman “getting fucked.” Or, given an image with a traditional “male gaze” such as the one above, some (heterosexual) women may enjoy it because they have conformed to hegemonic cultural ideals in which the female form is inherently sexualized; they have become their own sexual object. In each case, these can be described as homo-gazing women.

In much the same way, this formulation explains my significant affinity for pornography focusing on male-submissive objects. Male Submission Art is an intentionally homo-gazing project because I’m featuring submissive masculinity and I identify as a submissive man myself—arguably a highly narcissistic behavior. In other words, the experience of strong homo-gazing/object-identifying behavior while consuming porn can be described as the experience of desiring to be desired—an experience no less “natural” for men than women, despite the insistence of simplistic, gender essentialist analyses.

Meanwhile, the traditional “male gaze” in straight porn presumes the (male) consumer is both heterosexual and hetero-gazing. What else explains the pernicious idea that men “identify with” the male actors when their most prominent identifying feature—their face—is so often cinematically decapitated? What else explains that even these (exclusively) heterosexual men rarely, if ever, take issue with the proliferation of purposefully visible giant cocks? Showing the cock owner’s face challenges the suspension of disbelief necessary for straight, hetero-gazing men to identify with the well endowed subject, reducing the efficacy of the porn’s theatrics.

Sexism’s Influence on Gaze

Using the framework provided by gaze orientation, I can also articulate the intense discomfort of feeling as though I need to “change the genders around in my head” when I look at most porn, same as many (heterosexual, hetero-gazing) women do. Such gaze dysphoria is more evident upon examinations of asymmetric power. For example, in her analysis of the 1980′s TV show Cagney & Lacey, Danae Clark succinctly describes sexism’s influence:

Dominant theories of spectatorship maintain that traditional (male-governed) texts are founded on a subject/object dichotomy that places a male subject in control of the ‘gaze’ and positions the woman as object of his look. Since the woman becomes the passive raw material for the active gaze and visual pleasure of the male, the female viewer’s possibilities for identification become extremely limited; she must choose between adopting the voyeuristic (sadistic) position of the male subject or the masochistic position of the female object.

Clark recognizes the quagmire that power differentials along gendered lines (i.e., sexism) places on “the female viewer’s possibilities of identification,” implying that neither the position of the male subject nor that of the female object is desirable for female viewers. However, she seems constrained by theoretically coupling active and sadistic behaviors with maleness; the “voyeuristic (sadistic) position” is desired by some women. To escape this constraint, we can be aided by Dr. Staci Newmahr’s insights on BDSM play⁹ in her recently published book, Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy.¹⁰

It is impossible to understand [archetypes of topping and bottoming] outside gender; they are themselves gender stereotypes. Beyond performances of powerful and powerless circumstances, they are active representations of being powerful and powerless, or of victimizing and being victimized. Topping and bottoming are both active processes undertaken to and as engagement in performances of victimization and power differentials. This is not to claim that these performances are therefore anti-feminist or otherwise philosophically objectionable[…]. There is, as SM researchers and practitioners have long insisted, an important distinction between victimization and consensual engagement in performances of victimization. Nonetheless, while the latter precludes the former, it is the existence and cultural coding of victimization that gives these performances meaning. In this sense, we can explore these performances within their gendered contexts, yet move away from the categories of “woman” and “man” as the salient hermeneutic constructs.

The existence of BDSM players who identify as dominant women or submissive men has long problematized socially conservative feminist discourse precisely because it challenges the hermeneutic constructs on which conservative social ideology depends. Similarly, the existence of homo-gazing/object-identifying women challenges the “male gaze’s” corollary. Flipping Clark’s statement on its head, if the “female gaze” can be understood as a subject/object dichotomy that places a female subject in control of the ‘gaze’ and positions the man as object of her look, then this female viewer is implicitly cast as hetero-gazing/subject-identifying. A (masochistic) woman whose satisfaction is derived from empathizing with other female objects suffers the reciprocal quagmire as the one Clark described.

This suggests that the efforts of various counter-culture pornographers, notably many creating “porn for women,” employ the same flawed dialectic as mainstream pornographers producing “male gaze” iconography. Rejecting this false dichotomy—adopting a both/and mindset—offers both emotional comfort (in validating common gaze-dysphoric experiences) and a sexologically and psychoanalytically sound explanation for, as an example, why some women find Filament Magazine sexy while others don’t. Notions of erotic satisfaction derived from consuming pornography are obviously best explored as a composite of the pornographic artifact itself and the experience of its consumption, but the atomic sociosexual parts engaged in such an experience have not yet been fully enumerated.

Just as Newmahr suggests we “explore [BDSM] performances within their gendered contexts, yet move away from the categories of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as the salient hermeneutic constructs,” I suggest moving away from the categories of “male” and “female” when exploring the experience of porn consumption. Put another way, if you’ve ever longed for terminology that explains the difference between looking at porn and thinking “I want to fuck that girl” or thinking “I want to be that girl,” perhaps expressing the latter in terms of a gaze attraction, rather than a sexual attraction or a gender identity, will be useful.

When it comes to the consumption and creation of pornographic artifacts (viewing imagery, writing erotica, etc.), but notably not when it comes to patronizing and providing erotic labor (soliciting a prostitute, doing escort work, etc.), I posit that gaze orientation is the most significant, or at least unconsidered, hermeneutic characteristic relating to one’s satisfaction with pornography.

1. The only people who do seem to “dislike all porn” are, of course, absexuals—folks who find pornography abhorrent. These people are typically polemicistic anti-porn crusaders for whom any and all “porn” is ideologically incompatible with “erotica,” a category containing depictions many of them do claim to “like.” For the purposes of this discussion, I treat “porn” and “erotica” as synonymous since my intent is to explore any (sexualized) satisfaction acquired through any media, regardless of how the consumer categorizes said media or maintains any philosophical objections to it.
2. Also, as I am most assuredly a foreigner in academic lands, I don’t have as much insight into formal research results as others might. I am, after all, a middle school drop-out, albeit one interested in reading academically rigorous studies on porn. Links in comments welcomed!
3. Remittance girl elaborated in a follow-up post, which also has an interesting comment thread.
4. These anecdotes seem further supported by numerous studies in which women view porn and are observed for physiological and psychological responses. See, for instance, Sexual arousal in women: A comparison of cognitive and physiological responses by continuous measurement and Sexual arousal in women: The development of a measurement device for vaginal blood volume. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to gauge these studies’ precise relevance to this discussion in part because the particular pornography used is not publicly available (and as a starving activist, I haven’t the resources to purchase the studies’ full text or other materials). What is notable, however, is the prevalent cognitive dissonance among women studied.
5. I don’t have any numbers, but private correspondence with publishers of material explicitly designed around a “female gaze” informs me that there are literally near-zero female photographers who exclusively photograph male models. Don’t believe me? Read Where Are The Women Who Photograph Men?
6. True to his reportedly narcissistic form, the Kinsey scale is named after Alfred Kinsey.
7. I use “sociosexual” here and elsewhere in this post to refer to the sum of a person’s social and sexual constitution, not in the formal psychological sense as a behavioral orientation measuring a desire to engage in sexual acts independent from feelings of love.
8. It is noteworthy that psychoanalytic discourses on gaze describe the concept as observing the observation of the self, as in by literally watching oneself in a mirror. Psychoanalytic theory formalizes notions of imagination by passage through a “mirror stage” of psychological development, that is, when a child is able to recognize that their own image in a mirror is their own image. Such an understanding of the self is necessary to form a distinction between “I” and “you” and is therefore a prerequisite for developing at least a homo-gazing orientation, as the viewer of a pornographic image actively seeks to empathize with or project their identity onto the (objectified) model. (A hetero-gazing orientation may not rely on a prior “mirror stage” since in this case the viewer conceptualizes the sexual image as a mere extension of their own eyesight.) This also means that a gaze orientation is not necessarily inborn, as other usages of the “orientation model” may imply.
9. Since BDSM play explicitly references both relationships of asymmetric power and theatrical ritual, it is an outstandingly useful lens for this analysis.
10. See Playing on the Edge, p. 114, paragraph 2.

According to Rabbit, Lady Porn Day is “about celebrating pornography and masturbation. It is an opportunity for ladies of all genders (or however you identify) to open up a dialog.” All right, I’m thinking, I can totally support that. So I click on over to her project page and, sadly, my heart deflates.

What happened? I was greeted by this:

A skinny white woman wearing nothing but a white fur-lined coat with big blonde hair and big glasses baring it all in a public venue. It’s a digital flyer for Lady Porn Day, the text of the advert itself serving double-duty as publicity and censor. This is Lady Porn Day?

While this may certainly be a “celebration of pornography,” the loudest dialogue I can see predictably coming out of it is more of the sex-positive community’s lies. Yes, we tell lies, too. As Madame Thursday wrote in her excellent post, “Sex-Positivity and other lies on Tumblr“:

People have been celebrating the sexualities of attractive white people for centuries. In fact, I’d say if there were ever a time when people’s discomfort towards sex dissipates and they’re willing to accept, tolerate, and engage with sexual content is WHEN it comes in the form of these bodies, these pre-approved forms.

[…]

I looked and looked in those sex positivity blogs and sites, in their pictures and stories and I didn’t find a lot of fat people (male or female), people of color, queer people. I have yet to find a mainstream sex positivity site (yes, this movement has a mainstream) that features transgendered people in all their beauty. Forget seeing disabled people displaying their various modes of sexuality. Forget seeing their bodies displayed as revolutionary and world-changing and an example of how sex is really, really awesome.

I learned soon enough that most sex positivity is actually White Straight Thin Able Cisgendered Cissexual Positivity.

And the world is already positive enough on those traits, thank you very much.

But maybe Rabbit’s White Straight Thin Able Cisgendered Cissexual “celebration of porn” poster is a fluke. Maybe I should just scroll down the page a little bit, right? Well, down the page there are 11 other flyers for Lady Porn Day. Predictably, however, they’re all like the first:

Of these 12 “fantastic official Lady Porn Day banners,” which Rabbit (perhaps unsurprisingly at this point) says were sourced from Tumblr, female bodies feature in a grand total of 11 of them. Male bodies feature in a total of 3. Of those three, 1 banner shows only male bodies, while the other 2 both show a heterosexual pairing. Of those 2 with a heterosexual pairing, you can see the woman’s face in both photos while the man’s face is visible in only 1.

And for those keeping score on the racial and body size fronts, there is only 1 dark-skinned model in the entire collection, and 1 model even remotely approaching “plus” size. But at least they are token-included. There are, of course, zero submissively-depicted men.

That’s why I feel neither inspired nor impressed by the supposed discussion this project purports to be hawking the blogosphere’s way. Far from being something novel, the homogeneity of these images are simply another all-too-obvious “hidden” standard: a male gaze coming from a woman’s eyes.

Admittedly, this is a topic I am touchy about. So I asked some lady friends for a sanity check. Clarisse Thorn, in her careful, gentle style, offered her own take:

When Rabbit recruited me for Lady Porn Day, I didn’t feel like her initial images were very diverse, so I suggested that she include different races and body types. She took the tip with good grace and added a couple of new images immediately, which I think shows her openness to having this conversation. It is definitely an ongoing conversation though—one where there are plenty more points to be made about diversity of body types and sexualities and what the “male gaze” versus “female gaze” really means—and one that I hope the bloggers and pornographers involved in Lady Porn Day will take seriously.

So, this is how Lady Porn Day’s publicity is easily perceived, at least by others sensitive to this issue. The only perceptible novelty I see in Lady Porn Day is that the male gaze is being proffered by a skinny white woman.

But don’t take my word for it. Take Rabbit’s:

It’s tough trying to explore porn as a girl. There just isn’t much lady-friendly stag.

That seems a funny statement coming from someone who asserted these overwhelmingly abundant and stereotypical images are her own masturbatory fodder:

the flyers are from my porn files, things I find hot!

The only way I see to make sense of her statement is to posit that, in her mind, the flyers are neither “what counts” about the project nor, presumably, are they (collectively) male-gazey precisely because she is a woman, which would at best betray a grave misunderstanding of the concept.

I am no woman, but my gaze skews far more “female” than Rabbit’s. If I exist this way, then surely it is not merely possible but acceptable for her to have a male gaze (regardless of how uncomfortable she may be with that fact). Hell, I even find women with male gazes attractive in their own right.

More to the point, however, which position is more sex-positive, even pro-porn? A position that essentializes one’s gaze based on one’s gender (e.g., women can’t have a male gaze because they are women) or a position that individuates both one’s body and one’s desires?

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve no beef (pun intended) with Rabbit’s personal preferences. And I think Rabbit’s goals, which she articulated quite well, are noble:

Girls aren’t encouraged to talk to each other about porn– the same way we aren’t encouraged to talk to each other about masturbation. In girl-world, too often we expect our first orgasm to come from a partner. Then we expect our Sex-and-The-City approved hitachi-orgasms to come from, well, our closed eyes. But porn is just another tool for your sexual growth. And according to statistics more women are watching porn than ever, growing stronger in our silence apparently.

[…]

At it’s heart, this is about celebrating pornography and masturbation. It is an opportunity for ladies of all genders (or however you identify) to open up a dialog: What is feminist porn? What is your history with porn? What do you find hot?

And ultimately it’s a dare to share your hot links. Because the more we can openly talk about porn and what we like, the more likely it is that porn for women will continue being made. And really guys have been sharing and recommending porn for ages! So help a sister out.

Yes, totally, talk about this! Moreover, if this is just your way of getting a conversation about the ubiquity of the male gaze going, Rabbit, even when it’s shared by some women, then more power to you. But don’t for one moment discount the effect that opening such a conversation in the way you did will have on it. That’s like going around organizing a conference about women in business by lining up a bunch of men to speak and then claiming that you made that decision because, despite being a woman, you just find men to be better at running businesses. And there, again, I would not question your individual opinion, but I would question what the fuck you’re doing organizing conferences about women in business that way.

Such behavior has many precedents among women. It simply means these women have more in common, on this particular point, with the stalwarts of the status-quo than with progressive innovators. (Phyllis Schlafly, anyone?) Or, as the inimitable Bitchy Jones put it, “This is a sad, sad situation, but maybe, just maybe, slightly more inclusion might be possible if you looked a bit further than your own fucking hard drive.”

This is far from flippant. When one tries to publicize a “conversation” about “lady porn,” is it so difficult to look beyond one’s own porn stash for publicity photos? And if that is just too (ahem) hard—hey, I understand talking about sex can be…distracting…sometimes—why discount the importance of the marketing material as if it has little or no effect on the resultant conversation? A conversation, by the way, explicitly acknowledged as having been hugely influenced by marketing material like Sex and the City and brand-name (Hitachi) orgasms.

At the very least, why not offer one’s graphic source files and encourage others to make more flyers, rather than proclaiming them “done”? (Update: Rabbit seems to have taken this suggestion. Good on her! Don’t let anyone tell you being harsh means you’ll lose your influence—I get told this all the time by “nice” people, and while they’re nice, they’re clearly wrong.)

I’m deeply saddened every time the sex-positive community turns a blind eye to its own minorities. It is not as though those of us with a “female gaze” are quiet about that fact, yet we are consistently underrepresented.

And, at the risk of sounding exasperated, I am tired of people who like to get off by looking at skinny white women—regardless of whether they are skinny white women themselves—orchestrating conversations about “porn for women.” I am tired of the preponderance of the male gaze in advertising material for sex-positive events and products. And most of all, I am tired of people conflating issues (like gender vs. gaze, in this case) to excuse their own privilege in spaces they say were expressly designed to have that very conversation.

That all said, hey, I acknowledge this particular conversation is just beginning. For all I know, maybe this disappointing opener is “all part of the plan.” So if nothing else, I hope this post serves as food for thought and maybe even a call to action to anyone considering getting involved.

Interview on FCCFreeRadio segments

The conversation I had with Lilycat and my fellow guest, an artist by the name of Chris Fabbri, didn’t just stay on KinkForAll topics. We talked about a lot of things, and with Lilycat’s permission I’ve chunked up the interview into 5 separate edited segments:

1. Segment 1 (MP3) – 13 minutes – Finding one’s place or making a space for yourself, self-respect and respect for others and the arts, what’s “conventional” and how that interrelates with body image, and KFASF of course!
2. Segment 2 (MP3) – 10 minutes – Submissive masculinity, power in submission, art and culture, having fun being who you want to be, MaleSubmissionArt.com.
3. Segment 3 (MP3) – 12 minutes – Gender bias and transphobia in mainstream media, acknowledging youth sexuality and young people’s agency, empowerment versus protection.
4. Segment 4 (MP3) – 26 minutes – Art and censorship, connecting the dots between various “isms,” how education and self-expression empowers young people, anecdotes about abstinence-only preaching, SexEdEverywhere.com.
5. Segment 5 (MP3) – 10 minutes – Living in San Francisco, addressing inclusivity in community organizing.

Thanks so much to Lilycat for inviting me on and for letting me share the audio recording on my blog! Lilycat’s show, Lilycat on Stuff airs every Sunday at 2 PM Pacific time on FCCFreeRadio (107.3 FM).

Also, don’t forget that even if you’re not in the bay area, block off March 21 to watch KinkForAll San Francisco’s live Internet stream and participate online! Of course, if you are local to the Bay Area, please sign up for KFASF and stop by! I’d love to meet you there. :) Here’s all the 411 on KinkForAll San Francisco, in case you need it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m looking forward to it!

• I realize this will probably be “too techy” for some of my readers, but what the hell. This not-so-recent article on Read Write Web has caught my attention a while ago and I’ve been musing about this sort of thing ever since. Marshall Kirkpatrick summarizes sociology and technology researcher Corinna Bath’s findings as he asks “Will the Semantic Web have a gender?”
  

  […]the architects of the semantic web need to be very careful about the assumptions they carry into the creation of categories of relationships. Bath draws a historical parallel with the first phone books, where listings were organized by the names of the husband in each household. That appeared to the authors to be the logical way to do it at the time. It wasn’t until after years of feminist political organizing led to general cultural change that the phone books changed. Why is this important? Because systems like the phone book help color our view of the world we live in and are the building blocks of basic inequalities.

  Too often, Bath argues, “binary assumptions about women and men are not reflected [upon] or the (gender) politics of [a particular] domain is ignored. Thus, the existing structural-symbolic gender order is inscribed into computational artifacts and will be reproduced by [their] use.”

• Speaking of the Web, Elizabeth writes about her concerns with WordPress.com’s censorship of what it deems “mature” content. This is precisely why I host my own blog on my own server, and part of why I’ve helped Kink in Exile and Essin Em do the same for themselves. If you need tech help doing the same, feel free to contact me, and since I reserve the right not to reply, you should have no qualms about “bugging” me with a request for help.
• Ranat writes what is very probably the funniest and sexiest post I have read in a long time called Pon Farr and Other Ways to Get Away With Non-Consensuality (because we love Vulcans). I’m not sure if I had a geekgasm or a trekgasm while reading it, but some of its ideas could certainly fuel a number of fantasies capable of giving me just a plain old orgasm!
• As he is wont to do, Axe humorously writes about the unequal door fees for women and men at most kink/fetish venues, and quotes my response to his question:
  

  Perhaps it goes back to the age old question: If women are just as into this stuff as men, where are these women? Why are men paying a hundred bucks to get into a swingers event and women can walk in for free? Are the men like myself who want to go to events like these so horrible and disgusting that the only way a woman will go is if she has nothing better to do?

  I posed this question via twitter and a few people responded.

  […]

  Maymay gave me some of his wisdom via twitter. “The reason kink/fetish events are cheaper for women is blatantly obvious: sexism. Women are products, men are the consumers.”

  Oh how I wish this wasn’t true. If only I were being the one consumed and used like a product.

  I also replied to his post in the comments:

  [W]hen I go out to kink events like this with a significant other, here’s how I expect to look at the costs:

  $5 for women + $25 men / 2 people = we each pay $15 entry fee

  I’d consider any woman or man in a supposedly equal relationship, D/s or otherwise, who doesn’t also do that sexist.

• Tom Allen informs us about the Boy Scouts’ decision to include (some) sex ed topics in their program. Tom has this to say about the move, which I can’t second strongly enough:
  

  The sooner we, as a society, can kick off the notion that morality is tied to sexuality (or more specifically, sexual enjoyment among consenting partners), the better off we will all be.

• Last but certainly not least, today FetLife.com announced the addition of a “Fluctuating/Evolving” option was added to the list of possible options for users to list as their sexual orientation on their profiles. John Baku had this to say about his choice to add the option:
  

  Things can not get simpler then being a straight guy which to be honest I find is a bad thing in my position. It basically means I have to wait until someone opens up my eyes to the different types of orientations and as well the issues and politics behind the different sexual orientation.

  I believe FetLife is the first site to get this right. Ever. Congratulations to them, and I hope more sites follow suit, not just for sexual orientation but for gender identity and other options as well. I eagerly anticipate the day when the notion of radio boxes for “male” or “female” will not be the only options!

• A Pleasurably Versatile Experience – This is my latest sex toy review published on EdenFantasys.com. I think you’ll find it quite interesting, especially considering it’s a review for a toy that is ostensibly made for the purpose of hanging weights off one’s testicles, and I’ve shared my opinion on that almost laughable practice before. Here’s a choice excerpt:
  

  Cock and ball toys are without doubt one of the most unfortunately stereotyped of all sex toys. Those made out of leather and metal, even more so! The Large Parachute’s description doesn’t help any here, citing that “this original cock and ball torture accessory…provides a firm grip over the package” and “has a 6” long jewel chain that lets you attach additional weights for an increased cock and ball tease.”

  […]

  The good news is that I discovered other uses for the Large Parachute. The bad news is that it’s still mostly useful only for the types of CBT play you’d expect because it’s not as durable as it needs to be for some of the more inspired uses I came up with for it.

  If you’re so inclined, I’d very much appreciate a positive vote on my review(s).

• When I Was A Boy – this is one of my good friend Switch’s latest posts that I read tonight and just about fell weak at the knees over. It’s so good and full of queer gender-bending hotness that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to link to it. My favorite part:
  

  In this submissive position, my cock meant a whole other thing. It never occurred to me that I was a girl in that context: I was a boy, submissive to a bigger, stronger Boy. And I LOVED it. I had never been a boy the way I was like that, even though vaginal intercourse made my girl parts very apparent. Nor had I ever felt submissive in the same way I did, with my hard silicone cock pushed into the bed and the base pushing against my pubic mound, turning me on even more as Boy fucked me.

  Guh!

• Also, just because I can, a pair of links go out this week to KinkInExile.com and Essin-Em.com, who have simply been on my mind a bit lately.

On a completely unrelated note, I think it’s worth a mention that Conversio Virium is receiving an ever-growing amount of email on a wide array of topics. In the past week alone, we’ve received email from:

• three event organizers to let us know about their events (whom all got responses with instructions for how to contribute to the public calendar of sexuality events that CV hosts),
• another two emails from people who want to write about the group in other publications, one from the Columbia University Spectator newspaper seeking content for sexuality-related articles,
• another from a student of a non-Columbia-affiliated NYC-based University interested in attending CV meetings,
• an admittedly random email about some cross-campus game of Risk (WTF?),
• and another from what seems like a random visitor concerned about her daughter’s safety because she is “into S and M.” (This was the email that prompted me to add a link to the Kink Aware Professionals list hosted by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom on our contact page.)

That’s no less than 9 emails this week, more than one per day on average, and I’m pretty confident that CV’s email load will simply continue to grow as it gains more exposure.

Just…food for thought. Okay, that’s all. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming, kthnxbai.

I very recently did exactly this (although I was much nicer than I could have been) on a local young-persons-in-Sydney group’s mailing list. I remarked that I had done so, and due to popular demand and interest with regards to my remarks, am going to share a single edited excerpt of that thread here. In case anyone is local and cares to join the group, here is my original post.

The year is 2008. The place is Sydney, Australia. The topic is male bisexuality in the BDSM community. The population of the scene here…well, the population of the country is barely the size of the state I came from. These people are not “simple, country folk” by any stretch of the imagination, yet I can’t help but feel as though I’ve been transported to a kink scene from ten years ago:

Congratulations in advance to those of you who actually follow and read the linked references. Those of you who don’t will assume I am just rocking the boat. I am, of course (rocking the boat that is)—though I’m trying to do so while adding significant substance to the conversation.

On Aug 4, 2008, at 5:07 PM, Person A wrote:

In my brief time in the sydney bdsm scene, i’ve noticed girls are a lot more willing to play with other girls than guys are to play with other guys. why do yo think this is? Do you think bisexuality is more comon in girls in the vanila world too. Do girls who engage in bdsm play with other girls even consider themselves bisexual. looking forward to your comments

for the record I am 100% straight male.

So is my male dom top friend who is dating a boy. Though labels like “staight” or “bi” can be useful, they are ultimately meaningless. It’s actions, not words, that define people and who they are.

Person A then wrote:

I’d feel uncomfy playing with a guy, even if just tieing me up etc. how do other guys feel.

Lots of “straight” guys feel this way while encouraging girls to get it on with one another, and if you haven’t noticed most guys in the BDSM community you’re a part of are straight. Perhaps that’s why you’ve noticed that girls are a lot more willing to play with other girls than guys are to play with other guys. Huh. Imagine that.

See also this satire: http://bloodylaughter.com/2007/07/26/eureka/

On Aug 4, 2008, at 5:34 PM, Person B wrote:

that’s because girls are just the more attractive sex, is my guess.

Person B, we’re both lucky we don’t really know each other because it makes it a lot easier for me to tell you that you’re being an ass right now.

On Aug 4, 2008, at 7:54 PM, Person B tried to redeem his statements by qualifying them like this:

I meant that in the most objective way possible, which is not to say that I don’t find certain guys attractive and would even consider certain BDSM scenarios involving that person, but it happens very
very rarely for me and he’d have to be pretty fit. And I think most girls would agree with me that girls tend to be more attractive than guys in general. Is that true or have just been speaking to the the wrong girls?

You’re oozing the kind of heteronormativity that makes me dislike heteronormative spaces—like this list right now. Personal preferences are one thing, but trying to pass these off as “statements intended in the most objective way possible” belies your ignorance. Again, I say that heteronormative culture encourages exactly this kind of thinking.

See also:

http://maybemaimed.com/2007/08/21/i-want-to-be-a-pretty-boy/
http://maybemaimed.com/2007/12/12/the-rules-of-flirting-are-sexist-and-wrong/
http://bitchyjones.wordpress.com/2007/07/17/the-unfairest-of-them-all/

On Aug 4, 2008, at 6:02 PM, Person C wrote:

hi all, long time lurker first time poster. I consider myself a straight male as i can’t really see myself being with a male sexually without bondage being a huge part. It was something that i was very nervous about until my Mistress at the time introduced me to the concept of playing firstly with couples and then eventually she was happy (as was i) for me to play solely with makes. Fem Dom’s are still my preference however my desire to please outways if there are dangly bits or not. Now i’m “out” i hope to catch up with some of you soon

And then, right on cue, on Aug 4, 2008, at 6:33 PM, Person D wrote:

Here’s my theories.

Girl on girl is a bit more socially acceptable than guy on guy due to the fact with guys there is the implied image of things up the arse.

Yes, exactly. God forbid something goes the “wrong way” up a man’s butt. Of course, every straight guy knows women’s asses are a two way street.

This is precisely why the feared “image of things up the [guy's] arse” has become the femdom cumshot in porn, and it’s where this (insulting) notion of “forced bi”—which is pretty much exclusively a femdom/malesub dynamic—comes from. Now, I love getting fucked in my ass, but I love getting fucked on my penis, too. In other words, being the person who does the penetrating does not equate to having power, or masculinity. Perverting (and I use that word deliberately) anatomy to create falsehoods of power imbalance is nothing more complicated than plain stupid.

See also:
http://bloodylaughter.com/2007/07/11/fuck-him/
http://maybemaimed.com/2007/08/12/pegging-gets-mainstream-attention-and-kinky-porn-gets-rightfully-slapped-upside-its-head/

Portions removed at the author’s request.

You’ve hit the nail on the head, though you’re not tying it all together quite yet. This is the same masculine heteronormative sexuality that defines male sexuality based on dominance and power, only it’s now happening in reverse. Where the former circumstance is one in which a man is dominant and thus validates hegemonic masculinity, this circumstance is one in which a man is submissive to another even more masculine/dominant/powerful man and thus validates hegemonic masculinity. As far as genders studies students are concerned, this is just a situation where you have six of one thing and half dozen of the other.

In other words, men’s fantasies that are geared around being submissive to a “real man” merely enforce the hegemonic masculine stereotype. Now, that’s not bad (it’s quite sexy—I personally love the idea of submitting to a strong, dominant, het guy I find physically attractive) it’s just very, well, we’ve all been there and done that.

See also:
http://bitchyjones.wordpress.com/2008/07/18/submissive-men-and-the-humanity-gap/
http://maybemaimed.com/2007/12/18/how-an-outdated-view-of-masculinity-ignores-the-needs-of-all-men/

Anyway, for more insights on gender and male sexuality, see this 10 minute video:

http://maybemaimed.com/2007/12/06/transgender-basics/

Regards,
–
-maymay
Blog: http://maybemaimed.com
Volunteering: http://ConversioVirium.org/author/maymay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She told me,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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