If we lived in a world where information launderers were not funded or encouraged, if we lived in a world where integrity was of greater value to more people than profit, or if we lived in a world where compassion trumped coercion, then I would not be writing this post. Sadly, we do not (yet) live in that world.

Last weekend, I learned that a website called PornWikileaks¹ has been publicly cross-referencing over 15,000 stage names of porn performers with their real names, addresses, and (in many cases) a plethora of other personal information in order to out them as sex workers. While the existence of the website had been whispered about for months, it hit the mainstream when Gawker picked up the story after Mike South published suspicions that PornWikileaks’ sources were the AIM Medical Associates P.C.‘s (formerly AIM Healthcare Foundation) own databases. The Gawker exclusive starts:

The patient database of the private health clinic that conducts STD tests for California’s porn industry has been breached, exposing test results and personal details about thousands of current and former porn performers, some of which have been published on a Wikileaks-style website.

Cue the media firestorm.

Now, when a big story breaks, I can forgive initial misunderstandings. With a functional press, however, accurate information is supposed to prevail as the dust settles but we haven’t had a functional press for some time, so that doesn’t appear to be happening. Moreover, a number of otherwise intelligent individuals are contributing to the damage by spouting misinformation about both PornWikileaks and its namesake, Wikileaks. And now I’m seeing irresponsible and imbecilic headlines like “Wikileaks Targets Adult Film Industry.” This will not do.

The root from which most other misunderstandings seem to be stemming is the assumption that PornWikileaks is a sexuality equivalent to the original Wikileaks. However, this belief bears no reasonable relationship to reality. With the caveat that I am not a lawyer or a pornographer, I’m aiming to provide some clarity on the issues others seem unable or unwilling to discuss factually.

Should I make a mistake here, I welcome corrections or further clarifications in the comments, but only if you provide reliable evidence and a cogent argument. We’re suffering from too much noise and too little signal in this story already.

Myth: Both Wikileaks and PornWikileaks have broken laws and violated people’s privacy

Fact: Wikileaks has not broken any laws. Only PornWikileaks has potentially violated laws but it, too, is arguably still legally protected.

But, publishing classified documents is illegal, right?

One of the lies that will not die about Wikileaks is that the organization is fundamentally criminal. Its detractors assert that the publication of classified documents is illegal. Some go so far as to claim that this amounts to violations of government officials’ privacy. These assertions are simply not true.

As Glenn Greenwald has been tirelessly reiterating time and again:

[T]he U.S. — unlike many other countries — does not have a general criminal prohibition on disclosing state secrets. It is, of course, illegal for those with an affirmative duty to safeguard secrets (such as government and military employees) to leak certain categories of classified information, but it is generally not illegal for non-governmental third parties — such as media outlets or private citizens — to publish that information. That’s why it’s extremely difficult to prosecute newspapers for publishing classified information — such as when The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers or the story of Bush’s illegal NSA spying program, or when Dana Priest exposed the CIA’s network of secret black sites. To simply assert that WikiLeaks or Assange clearly broke the law by publishing classified information — despite the fact that they are not government employees — is to exhibit a monumental ignorance of the subject matter on which one is opining.

For the most part, the ignorant people espousing this line of reasoning cite privacy rights as the rationale for their claims. However, privacy rights (at least in America) are so horrifically corroded that this rationale is amusingly ironic, to say the least.

Think you know your privacy rights?

In fact, whether you’re an employee of a corporation or the government, your employment essentially obviates your right to privacy while you’re using your employer’s equipment or while you’re “on the clock.” This is true even if you’re using your employer’s equipment “for personal use,” such as by accessing your personal email account. According to a fact sheet published by Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a prominent advocacy group in the United States:

If an electronic mail (e-mail) system is used at a company, the employer owns it and is allowed to review its contents. Messages sent within the company as well as those that are sent from your terminal to another company or from another company to you can be subject to monitoring by your employer. This includes web-based email accounts such as Yahoo and Hotmail as well as instant messages. The same holds true for voice mail systems. In general, employees should not assume that these activities are not being monitored and are private. Several workplace privacy court cases have been decided in the employer’s favor. See for example:

• Bourke v. Nissan, www.loundy.com/CASES/Bourke_v_Nissan.html
• Smyth v. Pillsbury, www.loundy.com/CASES/Smyth_v_Pillsbury.html
• Shoars v. Epson, fac-staff.seattleu.edu/mchon/web/Cases/shoars.html

I’m aware of only one instance where Wikileaks can arguably be said to have “violated” someone’s privacy, and that was when Wikileaks published Sarah Palin’s emails. But even this depends on whether Palin’s emails traversed a government computer or not, a fact that (as far as I can tell) has never been proven one way or another. And even this revelation might have been ethically justified, since Palin was found to be conducting State business from private accounts specifically in order to avoid responsible disclosure.

Can we say “libel”?

In contrast to Wikileaks, PornWikileaks has collated personal information, including false information, about individuals for the expressly articulated purpose of causing personal harm to them. In a legal context, this is called libel—something I have the displeasure of being intimately familiar with due to false accusations about my character from the likes of similar hate-mongers. In a followup article about PornWikileaks, Gawker reports:

Gay porn star James Jamesson was forced to post his negative HIV test result online to counter rumors spread by Porn Wikileaks that he had the disease. Jamesson said he was worried someone might believe he was knowingly spreading HIV.

Anyone tempted to trivialize Jamesson’s predicament should first remember that knowingly spreading HIV is a class 2 felony. That’s a serious criminal offense punishable by up to 15 years in prison in Idaho. A man convicted of the same crime in Texas, Philippe Padieu, faced up to 99 years in prison and was ultimately sentenced to 45 years.

Significantly, although Gawker reported that some STI test results have been published by PornWikileaks, I can find no evidence of this. Nevertheless, other media outlets have gleefully pounced on this error, parroting Gawker’s mistake. And, by the way, Gawker has yet to issue a correction over a week later. (WTF, Gawker? Fix that!)

Jamesson was also not the only person to be accused of knowingly spreading HIV. As Tracy Clark Flory reports, not only was “Christian” similarly targeted, PornWikileaks said it will be releasing STI test results in the future:

[T]here is chatter on the site’s message boards suggesting that STD test results may be published in the near future. […] Porn WikiLeaks entries use […] slurs against male actors alleged to have worked on both sides of the industry. […] Christian is one of those performers. “They posted my real name, the real names of my parents and pictures of them, their home address and telephone number, the name and picture and phone number of my brother, a picture of the cemetery where my grandfather recently passed away, not to mention saying that I have HIV,” he tells me.

The irony here is that due to the porn industry’s strict (and voluntary) adherence to screening performers for STIs every 2 weeks to 30 days, a service provided by AIM, the overwhelming majority of STI test results for active performers are likely to be negative, just like Jamesson’s were. Ignorance of this fact fuels the provably false, hateful stereotype of porn performers and other sex workers as “disease-ridden whores,” when in fact they are likely among the most knowledgeable people on the planet regarding HIV prevention and detection procedures—but that truth doesn’t seem to be slowing PornWikileaks from perpetuating the false stereotype. In this sense, PornWikileaks is more similar to anti-choice domestic terrorism or China’s “human flesh search engine” (thanks, TiaraMerchGirl) than it is to Wikileaks.

And therein lies yet another blindingly obvious yet unarticulated difference between PornWikileaks and Wikileaks: the former has not posted its purported primary sources, while the whole point of the latter, the whole reason so many powerful interests are so freakin’ upset with Wikileaks, is because they’ve consistently done exactly that. PornWikileaks simply asserts truth based on their own word, whereas Wikileaks publishes evidence regarding the people they are asserting facts about. In other words, the only material facts published by PornWikileaks are, amazingly, their own potentially prosecutable actions.

How about HIPAA?

Now, one area that some people are claiming PornWikileaks has broken the law where they have, in fact, not is HIPAA regulations. Sadly, even if PornWikileaks were to publish STI test results, they would not be in violation of HIPAA regulations because PornWikileaks can not be considered a “covered entity” (a healthcare provider of one sort or another). Unfortunately, if or when PornWikileaks does publish such information obtained from AIM’s database, then it would be AIM, not PornWikileaks, who would be in violation of HIPAA regulations.

I believe this is why there are some in the porn industry, like Ernest Greene, who say AIM itself is as much a target as the performers who were outed. As Anaiis Flox reports, quoting Greene:

AIM comes in for relentless bashing from Mike South, who is an “industry insider” only by his own definition and has a long-time grudge against AIM that he airs at every opportunity, and a small but noisy group of detractors with agendas of their own regarding the porn industry that AIM’s extraordinary record of successfully preventing workplace HIV exposures obstructs. They have already seized on this unfortunate incident to once again go after AIM, when it is guilty only of doing what it says it will and the real onus lies heavily upon the person who has taken it upon himself to compromise the security of people who were once his colleagues.

I’m not surprised, given the increasingly heated and complex politics of disease-hazard mitigation in porn currently roiling the industry, that this vile act has been appropriated as an excuse to yet again attack one of the most effective community-supported HIV prevention programs in the world by those who covet AIM’s credibility for their own attempts at seizing control of the testing and monitoring process for financial gain, but AIM is a victim in this matter, not a perpetrator.

Plausible legal options

In any event, as I understand it, there are really only two serious legal options to pursue against PornWikileaks because freedom of speech protects hate speech such as theirs and because they are invulnerable to HIPAA violations.

1. One option is to seek defamation convictions. This will be difficult because plaintiffs will have to prove that the information revealed about them is both untrue and causes financial hardship. I’m guessing this will be easiest, although unlikely, if performers who are no longer in the industry lose their jobs because they have been outed, which is a very real possibility. (See, for instance, what happened to Tera Myers, and how unsurprisingly hypocritical the anti-sex contingent’s response to this was.)
2. A far more realistic legal option is seeking a conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Success with that hinges on whether or not it can be proven that PornWikileaks was not merely a passive recipient of the information but actively involved in the breach of AIM’s database. Unfortunately, that means law enforcement will need to become helpfully involved, but government agencies have shown themselves to be essentially criminally selective when it comes to protecting sex workers. Monica Foster’s rebuffed attempts to seek help from the FBI is just another example of this societal negligence.

Ultimately, though, all of this legalese is feckless. By and large, people have been conditioned to live in an environment of universal criminality—even AIM is scurrying about convinced that PornWikileaks is criminally liable for something, anything, and stupidly comparing themselves to the Pentagon when they’re hardly of the sort—so I’m going to go out on a limb and say that none of these legalities really matter because the legal system is all kinds of broken. The really important issues PornWikileaks raises are sociological, not legal.

Myth: PornWikileaks’ administrator is doing to the porn industry what Julian Assange did to governments

Fact: The intentions of PornWikileaks’ anonymous administrator are vastly different from the positions of Julian Assange on many issues, notably an individual’s privacy rights.

Another widespread misconception is that the intentions and methodologies of both organizations are similar. PornWikileaks’s anonymous admin has done everything they know how to do to appear to the uninformed, ignorant, or just plain idiotic that they are doing to the porn industry what Assange did to governments: the PornWikileaks banner proudly proclaims, “Keep us strong—keep the industry open,” their logo is identical to Wikileaks’ hourglass logo with the word “porn” stuck on the front,² and their about page is almost a direct copy of Wikileaks’ about page.³ But from either a structural or social analysis, the purported similarity is an obvious facade.

To borrow Greenwald’s phrasing, to simply assert that PornWikileaks is like Wikileaks because it publishes information about individuals is to exhibit monumental ignorance about both the nature of and differences between privacy and secrecy. Even if I were to concede that individuals and organizations are not different, failing to distinguish privacy (the relationship an entity has to some piece of information) from secrecy (the condition of some piece of information being unknown) is clearly wrongheaded. Moreover, this is an area Julian Assange himself has been widely quoted discussing in interviews.

One interview with David Bailly published by the French magazine Paris Match (English translation) is particularly relevant:

PARIS MATCH: After the publication of the first diplomatic cables, a French minister said this: “A transparent society is a totalitarian society.”

JULIAN ASSANGE: Was it a former Communist? The Germans have a different way of answering, a way that’s more nuanced, because of their past. Their answer is: “A transparent government, not transparent individuals.” Transparency should be proportional to the power that one has. The more power one has, the greater the dangers generated by that power, and the more need for transparency. Conversely, the weaker one is, the more danger there is in being transparent.

This is hardly a revelation for many disadvantaged people, who routinely struggle to acquire some measure of control over their own lives in the face of institutionalized oppression. What PornWikileaks highlights more than anything else is the rabid whore-stigma and slut-shaming sex workers face, a kind of vigilante “naming and shaming” that hurts society at large, but is especially violent towards sex workers. And PornWikileaks’ anti-gay hate speech is yet another example of how this shit rolls downhill, hitting intersectionally underprivileged populaces harder than any others. In effect, this is the other side of the coin to what happened when white men objected to the TSA’s pathetic “security” policies.

If you need any more proof, compare the responses media personalities had to STDCarriers, a website providing searchable public registries of persons allegedly infected with a sexually transmitted infection, with the media’s response to PornWikileaks. Despite the fact that the similarities between the two sites (and their presumed creators) are plentiful, media response has been decidedly one-sided in each case. Why?

Since PornWikileaks targets the marginalized while Wikileaks targets the powerful, claims that the two organizations’s ends are the same are plainly false. But of course, the other salient difference is the level of scale the two organizations target; individuals versus organizations—their means are different, too. As Australian political columnist Kate Ausburn said of the distinction between personal privacy and organizational secrecy:

Failing to recognise the difference between personal privacy versus government secrecy is like comparing Wikileaks to PerezHilton.com. Do we have a right to know what goes on in the diplomat’s bedroom? No. But when it comes to the government boardroom, that’s a different story.

So, if Wikileaks were like PornWikileaks, it would be outing (or blackmailing) government spies, but not only is Wikileaks not doing that, they’re actively requesting (and being refused) help redacting the names of vulnerable individuals. People often confuse “freedom of information” with a “right to information” but freedom of information does not prioritize universal access (the abolition of privacy) above human rights. Quite the opposite; human rights are what freedom of information protects.

Take the red pill, literally for fuck’s sake

I could go on. For instance, there are differences between Wikileaks’ and PornWikileaks’ business model: demand-driven journalism versus pay-per-click advertising, respectively. (Yeah, PornWikileaks is hypocritically trying to sell ads for porn.) But I think this is enough, for now.

The similarities between PornWikileaks and Wikileaks are a ludicrous facade. They begin and end at PornWikileaks’ plagiarized branding. To say that PornWikileaks is in any meaningful way like Wikileaks is simply absurd.

The fact that so many people appear unable to see either Wikileaks or PornWikileaks for what they are—trans-national journalism and a hateful incitement to violence, respectively—is a grim reminder of the need for widespread media literacy education and of ignorance’s danger. Those of you continuing to imply any equivalency between the two organizations (particularly my fellow contextually overprivileged, white, cismale technologists) are aiding and abetting misogyny and homophobia on a massive scale. Whether by blaming the victims of a site that amounts to “a hate crime spree waiting to happen,” or by obfuscating the differences between PornWikileaks and Wikileaks, you’re part of the societal problem perpetuating an inhumane, barbaric belief that people who enjoy having sex and who allow others to see them do so deserve to be harassed, stalked, and violently assaulted.

So, with whatever respect due, I suggest you immediately knock it off.

If you are negatively affected by PornWikileaks’ despicable actions, or know someone who is, please refer to the following helpful resources:

• Violet Blue’s post about PornWikileaks includes risk mitigation information from Maggie Mayhem.
• LqqkOut compiled a list of stage names to help you see if you are affected.
• A rundown of legal steps to take to get your info removed from PornWikileaks.

Do you know of more helpful resources to combat PornWikileaks? Leave a comment and I’ll add to this list.

1. I refuse to link to PornWikileaks as it’s essentially an anti-gay, anti-sex worker, misogynistic hate site, and it’s too easy to find as it is.
2. Which is probably a copyright violation, by the way.
3. Except, hilariously, in places where the PornWikileaks admin forgot to change “Wikileaks” to “PornWikileaks,” which tells me they’re so technologically inept that they didn’t even use “find and replace” in their text editor.

UPDATE 2: As KinkForAll sessions are relatively short, I didn’t have a lot of time to dive into background material in this presentation. However, I did just that the following weekend at the “Anti-censorship best practices for sex-positive publishers” seminar I lead during Atlanta Poly Weekend, since I had way more time. If you’re finding yourself thinking about this post, you’ll probably find plenty of value out of following up with the longer presentation.

Yesterday was KinkForAll Providence 2 (“KFAPVD2″), the eighth of these (now national) free and open-to-the-public unconferences about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life. This one was put on as a fitting climax to Brown University’s Sex Week 2011, “unorganized” largely by xMech and SHEEC chairperson Aida Manduley. There were talks, presentations, and discussions about a range of different things, many of which were recorded by the live video stream I put up in the main room. You’ll be able to follow up with most of them at the KinkForAll Providence 2 schedule archive page as participants flesh it out in the coming days.

In my usual style, I gave a prepared talk and presented an accompanying slideshow. My talk was called “FetLife Considered Harmful: The Risks of Sex Ghettoization,” and I discussed what I see as a deeply dangerous, insular, growing monoculture within sexuality communities, epitomized by FetLife.com. This monoculture whitewashes the effects of privilege hierarchies while simultaneously reifying them in a way so ignorant and so terrifyingly undiscussed as to cause a lot of harm to individuals and “the community” en masse.

This was a challenging talk to research, it was even more challenging to write, but it was most challenging to actually present. This is not a nice talk. I am, ultimately, not interested in making nice with the community, with its leaders, or with its sex-negative attackers. Instead, I am interested in making change.

In part, this is because I have lost any and all significant investment I once had in “the community” and this, in turn, is because the community—unknowingly obsessed as it is with its narrow-minded, exclusionary ideals—is a place that is currently incapable of offering sanctuary or refuge from the hateful mainstream overculture for me and for countless others. In other words, I’m not an ambassador, publicist, or other form of PR-minded spokesperson for sex communities, and I am tired of their frequent, yet understandable spin doctoring. However, rather than discuss any pain this “community” inflicts from a personal perspective, since this talk was ultimately directed at wide swaths of the community itself, I approach the issue from the intersection of sociological and (elementary) technological analysis.

Below is a video of my presentation. As usual, my presentation is “open source” and Creative Commons licensed. Feel free to download it, use it yourself (including, since I can only be at one place at one time, literally re-presenting it wherever you wish and are able), or share it with anyone you think might find it valuable. If you do any of these things, I would greatly appreciate a link back to this page.

“FetLife Considered Harmful: The Risks of Sex Ghettoization” by maymaym on Ustream

Download:

• FetLife Considered Harmful: The Risks of Sex Ghettoization keynote presentation as a ZIP archive.
• FetLife Considered Harmful: The Risks of Sex Ghettoization keynote presentation as a PDF document.
• FetLife Considered Harmful: The Risks of Sex Ghettoization keynote presentation as a text transcript.

I purposefully kept this presentation as short as I felt was possible because, due to the 20 minute time limit on sessions at KinkForAll, and due to the fact that I was convinced the material in this presentation would spur heated discussion, I wanted to leave some room for a short Q&A after the talk. This meant I had to leave out a lot of depth, as well as many additional examples I could have cited. I may, at some point, present follow ups to this material that includes those in-depth details but, for now, I’m hopeful that there is enough here to get this long-overdue conversation started.

As expected, after I gave my talk, there were numerous questions and points raised from the in-person audience that I addressed, and are audible on the video embedded above. They were as follows:

• One person asked if FetLife could serve as a place of congregation and coordination for sexual minorities because the mainstream offers no such space. This was a great question. My (short) answer was that it can—in fact, every ghetto is by definition a place of congregation, and can potentially be a site of coordination as well—but the question is not whether these things are happening at all (they are) but how effective the result is. Currently, for many reasons, including current technical limitations that were sometimes chosen deliberately, harmful social norms deeply rooted within FetLife’s written rules (its “policies”) as well as its unspoken rules (its “practices”), and the active resistance of the sexuality minorities community as a whole for improving their ability to cooperate with one another, FetLife serves neither as a place of safe congregation nor a site of effective coordination.

  In fact, the greater problem is that in the current anti-sex climate at large any sexuality-specific website will become a ghetto and thus the solution is not to create sexuality-centric spaces as silos in the first place. Instead, we need to create decentralized networks that disperse our memberships and information into spaces that are (ostensibly) subject-matter agnostic. The Internet was designed for this, and sites like FetLife.com actively hinder attempts to safely diversify in this way.

• Several people asked whether or not I had spoken with John Baku before I presented my talk. The answer is “yes and no” because while I made John aware of my concerns, I did so over Twitter and thus did not go into much detail. On the one hand, I simply didn’t have the time to do so (and I doubt John did either, as we’re both pretty busy people). On the other, however, I preferred to get the attention of people at FetLife.com in this way because it is, frankly, more disruptive and I feel that the complacency with which the sexuality communities handle “internal” issues like this needs to be publicly disrupted. It should also be noted that while I think John Baku sometimes presents as a bumbling fool, I like him personally very much.

  Also, we as a community need to recognize that FetLife is a business. That does not mean it is inherently bad, but many people have begun treating FetLife as though it is their closest of friends as opposed to simply one of their business partners or service providers. (See also this absolutely classic response to this whole issue from a “community leader” on FetLife.) As a business, FetLife’s agenda is different from mine, and likely different from yours. At a minimum, we should be aware of this difference in perspectives.

• Another person questioned whether FetLife was actually better than I presented and posited that the site is actually more like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) than a ghetto. This question betrays a profound ignorance regarding the various structures coordination may actually take, not to mention the structures of both Alcoholics Anonymous and FetLife as organizations. My answer was that, no, FetLife is not like Alcoholics Anonymous because AA is a fundamentally decentralized organization while FetLife is a fundamentally centralized one. For more on why this questioner is simply flat-out wrong, I recommend reading The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom. See especially their second principle of decentralization: “it’s easy to mistake starfish for spiders.” (And, while we’re making analogies, you’ll actually see that KinkForAll is far more akin to Alcoholics Anonymous than FetLife is and will likely ever be.)
• This questioner also objected to my “conflation” of the LGBT community with the kink community. It is no surprise that this person self-identifies as a (top/dominant, cisgendered man and) member of the BDSM community, specifically. The strong tendency that BDSM community members have for reinforcing us/them (binary) thinking is a long-standing frustration I have with many of them and one that I view as inherently counterproductive (not to mention blatantly hypocritical) to their own stated mission statements. It was a derailing question and one I almost answered except for the fact that we really, really ran out of time at that point.

Notably, there was also a participant in the audience who offered a brief version of their own life story as a “data point” to support pretty much every point I made in this talk. That was quite unexpected and something I found very heartening. Thanks to you; you know who you are. ;)

Finally, here is a transcript of my talk in hypertext form. I encourage you to make use of the links herein; follow them, for they offer additional context and depth to the point with which they are associated.

August, 1966. “Cross-dressing” is illegal in San Francisco.

In the sixties, Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in the Tenderloin neighborhood was one of the few places in San Francisco where trans people could gather safely. They were unwelcome almost everywhere else they went. They were even often kicked out of gay bars.

Stonewall won’t happen for another three years. The LGBT community is currently known as the “homophile” community. America is experiencing a wave of mass student and youth protests against the war in Vietnam.

Three years before the Stonewall riots on Christopher Street, New York City, police entered Compton’s Cafeteria on Turk and Taylor Street in San Francisco. Fed up with the constant persecution, the transgender woman the officers were harassing threw her coffee cup in their faces, instigating a full-fledged riot that marked “the first known instance of collective, militant, queer resistance to police harassment in United States history“.

Many of the rioters were trans and homosexual members of “Vanguard, Incorporated,” an LGBT youth organization sponsored and funded by the Glide Memorial Methodist Church in San Francisco. Vanguard’s goal was to bring together factions of the San Francisco Tenderloin neighborhood—gay, trans, straight, police, businesspeople, and any other neighbors—to air differences peacefully and end discrimination. Later that year, the Vangaurd youth group changed its name to The Gay and Lesbian Center, becoming the first gay community center in the nation.

In 2002, I joined public sexuality communities; I began talking to people about their stories and started learning about the history of marginalized sexuality cultures. In 2009, the Internet turned me into a sexual freedom activist; I co-founded KinkForAll and I began traveling across America spreading the idea from city to city, coast to coast. But despite talking to thousands upon thousands of people, despite reading hundreds upon hundreds of news reports and blog posts and so on, it was not until 9 years later (2011)—this year—that I learned about Compton’s Cafeteria, or the central role trans people and young people played in fighting for sexual freedom from even before the start of the gay liberation movement in this country.

When people think of San Francisco they often think of Harvey Milk, or the Castro Theatre. “San Francisco,” they say, “sanctuary for the sexually open. San Francisco,” they say, “home for wayward queers. San Francisco,” they say, “epicenter of the sexual revolution.”

I’m no longer so sure.

Walk the streets of my (new) hometown of San Francisco in 2011 and, if you take the time to look around carefully, you may notice a peculiar thing. Go to the Castro and, yes, you’ll find it teeming with hyper-masculinized musclemen, visit the Haight and you’ll run into YUPpies and hipsters with their designer boutiques as plentiful as Starbuck’s are in New York. But go to the Tenderloin and you’ll find every disadvantaged group you can imagine: immigrants (especially from Vietnam), Blacks, and—of course—trans youth.

After the Compton’s Cafeteria riots, police essentially cordoned off the Tenderloin as an area where trans people, most of whom were sex workers, could go without getting bullied. The Vanguard youth had won territory—they were granted a ghetto—where they have largely stayed, largely invisible to the up-and-coming GLB(“T”) mainstream, to this very day. Not two blocks from where I live, on the corner of Sutter and Larkin Street, is where many of the city’s trans street walkers call their office.

In contrast to the Tenderloin’s intersectionally underprivileged populace, the monoculture of other neighborhoods is stunning—the ghetto of San Francisco’s Tenderloin is and has long been segregation, not sanctuary. Monoculture is, by definition, the creation of a privileged class; it rejects the value inherent in diversity in order to favor a particular set of traits. Like all other institutions, monocultures are inherently exclusionary.

And as our generation’s organizing is moving away from physical city streets and into what Steven Johnson calls the cyber-cities that are websites on the Internet, I fear some of them, and one website in particular, is unwisely recreating sexuality monoculture online.

We live in an amazing moment in history. As I bet any sexually vocal person will tell you (if you don’t already know), the Internet has fundamentally transformed our ability to communicate with one another. For example, before the Internet, if you were a gay teenager in bum-fuck nowhere, you were the only gay person in the world. Now, though, after the Internet, if you’re a gay teenager in bum-fuck nowhere, you’re one of millions of gay teenagers communicating online.

This is big. This is not merely the evolution of telecommunication technologies. This is a revolution.

But for a while now, I’ve been growing increasingly concerned about the monopolizing—and whitewashing—effects FetLife is having over sexuality community discourse. Like a fetish all its own, sex community inhabitants are turning to FetLife instead of their own blogs or local mailing lists to write, debate, and promote their art and events. FetLife is sucking us up like a big black hole, and we risk getting crushed by its gravitational force.

On its homepage, FetLife says it’s “similar to Facebook and MySpace.” On his Twitter profile, FetLife’s creator, John Baku, describes himself as “David” to other social networks’ “Goliath”. No matter how noble his goal, however, in an ironic twist of fate John may have inadvertently created the greatest threat to online sex community and cyber-sex culture that has ever existed.

For those who don’t know, FetLife.com purports to be a safe space made “by kinksters, for kinksters.” Once inside, you’re ostensibly within the “community’s” walls. Here, limited individual privacy controls means that almost anything you post to FetLife is potentially visible to any other FetLife user. At the same time, anything you post to FetLife is restrained within FetLife’s walled garden; no entity, whether human or machine, peering at FetLife from its outside can see inside.

This is the primary dialectic claiming FetLife is “private” and thus “safe,” but it is deeply and dangerously flawed. It is flawed first and most simply from an individualistic perspective. Secondly, it is flawed from a group coordination (i.e., single community) perspective—and even more so from a global interactionist perspective.

For an individual, FetLife’s primary “privacy” offering is simply that nothing you post will be indexed by search engines like Google. Since there is no way to access FetLife from outside FetLife, it’s like Vegas: what you say on FetLife stays on FetLife. The implicit claim, then, is that the entire container is safe.

However, since all that is required to gain access to FetLife membership is a (free) email address, the claim is farcical on its face. Claiming FetLife is either private or safe for any given individual is like breaking open someone’s back door and then selling them a stronger lock for their front door.

I’m astounded by how many people fail to realize how exposed they are within FetLife. In a recent article published in The Eye about Columbia University’s BDSM education group, Conversio Virium (CV), this was highlighted quite clearly:

For Devon, the nature of his career forces him to keep his scene self under wraps, and though he’s a CV regular, few people know his real name. He describes one particular night he was going out with a bunch of his job friends at T.G.I. Friday’s when a co-worker whispered “Devon” under her breath. “I have a secret—I know you’re on FetLife,” she said.

Frankly, I’m shocked that some malicious idiot with a blog hasn’t logged onto FetLife and mined it for LULZ yet—but I assure you, it’s only a matter of time. When that happens, it’s not going to be FetLife’s fault per sé, but it is their responsibility as a social networking company to portray both the technical and social aspects of their service in an accurate way. In this sense, Facebook is actually a far, far safer place for a savvy kinky individual than FetLife is right now.

FetLife should either prioritize and implement granular privacy controls post-haste (instead of what they seem to be focusing on, which is creating a mobile version, chat rooms, and a spam filter) or change its public line to reflect that it has no meaningful ones. Since having a false sense of security is more dangerous than having an awareness of one’s very real vulnerabilities, prioritizing anything other than privacy at this stage in the game is irresponsible.

But FetLife is also hurting sexuality communities globally by encouraging people to join what amounts to a voluntary ghetto, and doing that is as stupid as it sounds.

When The Eye posted its article about Conversio Virium, I noticed within minutes of its publication and I spread the word to members of the group via the discussion list they (sort of) maintain. But ever since FetLife hit this subculture’s mainstream (yes, subcultures have a mainstream), I knew that to get any notice at all, I had to cross-post it to CV’s FetLife group. As you can see in the two threads here, the public Google group has no responses, while the FetLife group has quite a number.

This is not merely annoying on a personal level, it is problematic for the entire community in at least two ways. First, when someone in the FetLife thread offered valuable additional information about the article, that information was not visible to anyone outside of FetLife. (It was up to me to cross-post the followup.) Second, since the FetLife login screen effectively repels Google, everyone from archivists to casual observers are guaranteed not to stumble upon the additional information.

This isolationism is dangerous; like an anti-Vanguard, it discourages the peaceful airing of differences, separates factions of the community from one another, and nurtures an in-group/out-group mentality void of leadership. Where is our generation’s Vanguard? Sexuality on the Internet is a terribly persecuted topic. Why are we, as a community, making it easier for our words—our voice—to be muffled? Don’t get me wrong. Some private spaces are necessary and helpful. But when so much community evolution takes place within a single, closed environment, we are voluntarily ghettoizing our most important cultural valuables.

Take, as an example, Asher Bauer’s excellent essay, Field Guide to Creepy Dom. At the top of his post, Asher says, “This is something I wrote about two years ago which has been reposted every which way all over the internet. I don’t even know where it is at this point, I just know that I still get repost requests for it all the time.” I did some digging and found that it was originally posted (where else?) inside FetLife.

Again, two things are worthy of note about this:

1. Despite being “reposted every which way all over the Internet,” Asher still received “repost requests for it all the time.” What this seems to suggest is that people were hearing about the article, but unable to find it on their own. Hence, the repost requests. Indeed, (at the time of this writing) Google’s cache only shows 6 hits on 3 different domains for a unique phrase within the essay. Of these, only one (1!) is a personal blog unaffiliated with one of John Baku’s “Goliaths.”
2. Despite the obvious importance of this essay to the BDSM community, only the people who had heard about it already were able to extract value from it, because only they even knew to go looking for it. And despite getting posted to the Internet by others, it took nearly 2 years for the essay to even make it outside the FetLife wall and onto the public ‘net in the first place.

The Internet gave the sexual revolution—gave us—warp speed. I fear the growing FetLife monoculture is pulling us back to impulse.

In contrast to Asher’s essay, Patti’s equally thoughtful essay, Safewords are Dangerous, was first published at Alt.com. For all the problems of Alt.com (and they, themselves, could fill a whole talk, much less a short KinkForAll one) Patti’s essay was then, and is now, public for any newbie who’s googling for “safewords” to find. Even Patti, however, has now cross-posted the essay to her FetLife journal, perhaps a tribute to the all-mighty social network effect gods.

This should not be surprising. FetLife has become a cultural institution, and it carries with it all the side effects of such an organization. As Clay Shirky says, “an institution is inherently exclusionary.”¹

The Internet has changed sexual culture. Is FetLife a peek into our future, or is it a reflection of our past? I fear it is the worst of both. Using FetLife, we’re unable to interact with the outside world while simultaneously being unable to interact to our full potential within its walls; promoting a “101″ class or doing outreach using FetLife is a waste of energy because those things should be geared for people who probably don’t spend time there.

In the words of Dar Williams:

And what's the future, who will choose it
Politics of love and music
Underdogs who turn the tables
Indie versus major labels
There's so much to see through
Like our parents do more drugs than we do

[…]

I am calling, can you hear this?
I was out here listening all the time….

Do you hear them calling? The masses of people, young and old, who don’t yet know where to look?

If you’re spending most of your time in FetLife’s walled garden, you’re not listening. But it’s worse than that, because as far as they know, you don’t exist. And that means they think they’re the only gay teenager in the world.

1. Quote is 4 minutes and 10 seconds into his speech.

Perhaps predictably, this very topic was raised in a question posed to the “BDSM 101″ panel that I participated in at last weekend’s Western Regional LGBTQIA Conference at UC Berkeley. On the panel was Sloane Soleil, a self-identified switch who notably enjoys heavy masochism. In her introduction, she disclosed that she had a history of cutting, prompting an anonymous question from the audience.¹

Unfortunately, to respect panelists in the closet, no recording devices of any kind were allowed, so I can’t remember the question in its own words (nor can I perfectly remember anyone else’s words). The gist, though, was something like this, paraphrased: “As someone who has a history with cutting, do you ever feel uneasy about seeking to satisfy your masochism in BDSM play or worry that what you’re doing is self-harming again?” That question was possibly the best one we received and I felt disgruntled by how little time we were given to discuss the topic.

As all great questions do, this one betrays an understandable ignorance coupled with eager curiosity. Sloane answered first, since the question was directly addressed to her, and she asserted the oft-repeated notion that she had no trouble reconciling her history of cutting with her interest in engaging in BDSM as a bottom because in the former case she was working through personal mental issues while in the latter she was simply seeking pleasurable experiences.² Other panelists jumped in after her, most of whom were simply reiterating Sloane’s assertions in their own words. Dean, a fellow panelist, made the point that one’s mindset while self-harming is typically self-destructive to the body (and thus unhealthy), while one’s mindset in doing BDSM is not (and thus not unhealthy).

These answers may be valid for the individuals giving them, but they are murky at best. Dean’s point in particular borders on incomprehensible because masochism is by definition a desire to engage in activity that is violent to one’s own flesh.

The issue with both the question and the answers others were giving was the failure to acknowledge the necessarily collaborative nature of BDSM play. This was a point I made on the panel, although perhaps not as clearly as I could have. “A top requires a bottom, and a bottom needs a top to play with,” I said. Another panelist, Lola Sunshine, immediately took issue with my statement by offering the facile and contrarian assertion that “you can totally do BDSM on your own.” She then offered numerous examples of things she thinks is “BDSM on your own” such as self-suspension.

Once again, however, a core distinction was being repeatedly and ignorantly obscured. While I agree that a panel such as this was, to quote fellow panelist Maggie Mayhem, “a sharing of deliberately different experiences with ideas side by side,” it clearly does no “good” and potentially can do a significant amount of “bad” for a representative of the BDSM community to actively obfuscate important facets of BDSM, a topic they are presented as being not merely knowledgeable about, but expertly so. My objection to Lola’s disagreement was not an attempt to win a debate, as Maggie implies, but to illuminate where and how the question’s premise was flawed, and nowhere is such an attempt more pertinent than an expressly academic conference about sexuality.

If and only if “BDSM play” is understood specifically and exclusively as the experience of physical sensations does the question and the aforementioned panelists’s answers make sense. However, every experienced BDSM’er worth their weight in salt understands and should be able to articulate on an academic panel that BDSM can not be wholly understood as physical sensation alone—something Dean almost accomplished. As the panel facilitator was giving Lola the last word, I interjected, “It’s the same as the difference between (conventional) sex and masturbation.” I felt deflated because I was worried I was not understood.

To understand why self-harm has nothing to do with BDSM, there are two separate issues that need to be treated separately. The most obvious one, and the only one I felt was even recognized by others on the panel, is whether or not self-harm or BDSM is unhealthy. That’s an important question, but ultimately a distraction. The other issue, the one I was trying to bring to light, is far, far simpler yet goes even further in destroying the silly idea that BDSM is somehow an expression of self-harm.

To posit BDSM as self-harm (or, “self-abuse”), a position often advanced by anti-SM folk who like to capitalize on the fact that many BDSM’ers (including me, I’ll say publicly possibly for the first time) have a history of self-harm, is as ludicrous as saying masturbation is rape, not because masturbation is either negative or positive but because masturbation is necessarily a lone act and rape is not. Both BDSM and rape—regardless of any moral entanglements—necessarily involve multiple people. Self-harm, on the other hand, is by definition solitary.

Recall, for example, the process of negotiation and its importance to a successful BDSM scene. Even the very word “negotiation” underscores the involvement of more than one person. When viewed in its full capacity, BDSM play is an interactive social process in which players come to an agreement regarding their physical and emotional boundaries.

If you have some personal interest in BDSM, you may be able to find more examples from your own experiences. How many times have you “gone through the motions” during pickup play and ended the scene feeling unfulfilled? How many times have you tried flogging your own back, or spanking your own ass, and found the experience rather unmoving? If you’re anything like me, you probably felt like someone out of a Monty Python movie. Further, if such self-play is done in a public setting, most likely a club, then even lone acts become necessarily collaborative. How many times have you heard of tops and bottoms “enjoying the energy of spectators” in a dungeon?

Even where self-harm features in pop culture depictions of BDSM (such as in the movie Secretary), the two acts are markedly distinct.³ While it’s certainly the case that one can do bondage on one’s own, as Lola said, only the misguided argue that “having orgasms on one’s own” is the same as “having sex”; while the physical results may be similar in both circumstances, these are clearly different behaviors, possessing different motivations, and are approached in many different ways. Likewise, no matter the similarities BDSM acts and bodily harm may appear to have to uninvolved onlookers, it is obvious that they are different.

While we can (and many do) argue ’til the cows come home over whether or not self-harm is unhealthy, and we can likewise argue over BDSM, we would have to be ignorant or insane to argue that the two are similar.

1. Audience members were given the opportunity to write questions anonymously on pieces of paper that were then collected and read to the panelists.
2. Again, I’m paraphrasing from memory, so my apologies for any misrepresentation.
3. In Secretary, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character is fantasizing about James Spader’s character and tries spanking her own ass, but is disappointed by the result.

Perhaps paradoxically, I’m actually in favor of absolutism in exactly one context and one context only: the belief that diversity is the only principle worthy of absolutist loyalty.

This is why Thumper’s essentialist explanation of submission rubbed me the wrong way back when I first detected the unmistakable stink of the idea. While essentialist explanations seem plausible for an individual (“I am that I am.”) such reductivism is logically irreconcilable when applied to a group. So, this same laughably nonsensical reductivism is also what triggered me to leave the following intensely harsh (and possibly inappropriately mean) comment on Thumper’s most recent post with regards to a masculine identity.

For my own interests, I’m reproducing our public thread here.

I began:

Since you can take it, I won’t mince words. You wrote:

I firmly believe orgasm control is Right and Natural. There’s nothing kinky about it. It’s totally clear to me now that literally every man in a relationship should have his orgasm controlled by his partner (no, I’m not ignoring you gay guys, but I need to leave you out of this for clarity’s sake). I know that sounds very out there and draconian and like I know what’s best for the entire world. Can’t help it. You can disagree with me if you want, but it seems that, for a man, the act of committing himself to a woman would take on so much more significance if he was also committing one of the critical things that defined him as a man: his orgasm. Not only that, it would make it much more difficult for his partner to drift away. If he really meant it and lived up to his word, the two would be forever locked in a symbiotic feedback loop.

(Emphasis mine.)

Put simply, this is the most disgusting paragraph I have ever read from you, and possibly from any blogger in a very long time. Perhaps that is because I greatly enjoy your writing and find that you and I share much of the same fetishistic desires. So I am perhaps hugely disappointed, which thus fuels my disgust at such a ridiculous and callously sexist statement coming from someone who has a track record that has stayed relatively clear of such contemptible essentialism.

Tell me, Thumper, while you stroke your ego for so carefully addressing the wrinkle of homosexuality while simultaneously tossing it to the winds, what about the heterosexual women, what about the wrinkle of gender? What “should” they do with their desires, in your worldview?

On a related note, I would urge you to read the opening chapters to Sex At Dawn, which I hope will purge you of this pathetically reductionist view of the way men “should” be. Ick. This paragraph feels like everything I was warning you against in my (admittedly rambling) post, Orgasm Denial Does Not Submissive Men Make.

I am, in other words, legitimately an asshole sometimes. In case you wonder how I sleep at night, I justify it the same way any other asshole probably justifies it: I think I’m an asshole about “the right things” and not an asshole about “the wrong things.” So, yeah, it’s true I was meaner than I needed to be to get my point across. I hope I’ll do better the next time, and in the mean time I’ll acknowledge both my triggers (sexual authoritarianism and sexism) and my errors (making someone else feel unnecessarily bad).

Anyway, the comment did spark an interesting interaction worth reading. Thumper replied:

Since you can take it, then I’ll not mince words. Chill the fuck out.

Sorry, maymay, this isn’t religion for me or political. It’s my life and what I’m thinking at any given point. I am not here to advance any agenda. I am not trying to please you or anyone. If I disappoint you, we’ll both just have to figure out a way to deal with it.

Nice way to start the day. Thank you for your opinion.

To which I said:

I can take it, and you don’t have to mince words. Sarcasm, however, seems beneath you. Or maybe it’s not? I wasn’t kind, but I was direct.

Anyway, I’m sorry I contributed to a bad morning. That sucks. I’m just headed to bed and didn’t think about your sleep schedule.

You may never take an interest in politics, but politics will take an interest in you. Same thing as what you seem unwilling to acknowledge about my other post, too. Sigh.

As for religion…well, seeing as how you’re the one who brought that up, I’m struck with the unshakable notion that your views are a religion for you.

Such (religious?) adherence to an ignorantly essentialist view of human maleness, or indeed of any human characteristic, is perhaps the most destructive form of self-centeredness, for you declare others’ expressions illegitimate. And I say this, I hasten to add, as a self-identified man who not only would, but already has wholly subscribed to your beliefs for my own life.

I hope you consider these facts the next time you grant yourself absolution because “this isn’t…political.”

Then, circling back to answer my initial criticism, Thumper wrote:

Now that I’ve had a bit of caffeine, I’ll reply to your comment by saying the intention of my post was to describe a strategy in which men (with penises) and women (with the other part) in traditional marriages or long-term relationships could experience greater degrees of sexual intimacy and satisfaction. That should explain my (admittedly flippant) dismissal of the “gay guys” and, I suppose, by extension anyone not in the aforementioned gender group.

I loved Sex at Dawn. Thought it was great. And, truth be told, I think we humans have totally screwed with ourselves and our sexuality. However, I’m also a pragmatist. I live in this time and under these social norms and am married to a devout monogamist. Therefore, while I agree that my POV does not align with the vision of human sexuality presented in the book, I think it very much compliments the version of human sexuality that plays out in my house. Which, at the end of the day, is all I really care about. Were I like you (young, passionate, not married with two kids and a mortgage), I’m sure my position would be different. Alas, I am not. And I’m very happy not to be.

I have no interest in getting into a multi-thousand word debate about this with you. If you feel the need to rail against my pathetic, narrow, disgusting and icky words, please do so on your own blog. Don’t be upset, though, if I don’t ever read it. As I said before, sex is not political for me. It’s personal. You can go fight the good fight. Leave me out of it.

And, finally, my reply:

I think that’s all peachy keen. Until this:

As I said before, sex is not political for me. It’s personal. You can go fight the good fight. Leave me out of it.

You are the pre-eminent blogger about male orgasm control on the entire Internet, on par with Tom Allen. You are political whether you like it or not.

If you want to treat your sex life as wholly personal and not the least bit political, then you can not blog publicly. Otherwise, and I’m not sorry about this, you can’t have it both ways.

My final words on the issue, since I don’t want to overstay my welcome (and you have been generous with my characteristic harshness, so I thank you) will be to make clear that I care about this with “passion” precisely because we share a fetish and every single time I talk about it I reference this blog as one of the only sensible places on the entire Internet to learn about this fetish. It would upset me greatly to need to start disclaiming my admiration for you due to an increasing amount of relatively careless and flippant remarks specifically due to how often I cite your otherwise fantastic writing.

I hope I didn’t ruin your day. I shouldn’t have that much power over you. Thanks again for your generosity with your comments section.

There is, of course, something to be said for Thumper’s argument that we live in a particular world, with particular realities, and not some other world with some other realities. However, we know what we can say about that: it needs changing. I remain baffled by implications such as his that, thanks to the way things are, ideals like sexual egalitarianism even–and perhaps especially–when it comes to consciously constructed power imbalances are the illusory fantasies, rather than the other way around. The ideals I hold about sex are not the illusions, they are the core of our humanity, buried under eons of cultural sediments (stigma, collective phobias, mass hysterics like religion, and so on).

If reality was, in fact, as gender essentialist as Thumper described it, he would not have been able to actualize the relationship he currently enjoys precisely because such a relationship is founded on the very egalitarian ideals his thesis dismisses. He shoots himself in the foot with his own words, same as I sometimes do by forgetting to use honey in situations where it would catch more flies than vinegar.

Maybe next time Thumper and I talk, we will both have learned a thing or two. (If there is a next time.)

Update: Thumper’s got a reply on his blog. It’s worth a read, so check it out. TL;DR version and my reaction: Thumper affirms maymay’s asshole-ishness and will “amputate him from my life” (sic.) (well, okay, but owch), asserts that our worldviews are irreconcilable and as part of that his blog “is not a platform for any kind of activism” (except, as I keep reminding him, when it kind of is, which says more about how narrowly Thumper construes activism and how widely I do) and will continue to write his blog while abdicating any recognition of the influence he has. All right then. Truce?

1. I originally intended the prior, non-parenthetical link to point to Dan Savage’s post, and mistakenly pointed to Thumper’s post about an article by Dan Savage. Hence the inserted parenthetical statement.

Since I was a boy, I have been confronted with the maddening reality of being told to second-guess myself, that due to who I am (a person diagnosed with bipolar disorder) I can’t trust my own thoughts or feelings. Then I grew up and I learned that certain words do not mean to others what they mean to me. This has made me rather persnickety with regards to the lexicon of sexual speech.

Most people whom are more-or-less familiar with sexuality minorities tend to use “kink” and “BDSM” as interchangeable—that is, if they know what BDSM is. However, my experience is that those who are not already trained to think or speak in that fashion use “kink” dramatically differently. In thinking about this, I return, constantly, to Emily Rutherford’s sociological/historical musings on the same topic:

[T]o me “kink” was synonymous with “BDSM,” and I had to wonder […] where I, whose realm is primarily queer identity and politics, would fit in. […] As the LGBT community becomes increasingly mainstream and increasingly integrated into a “straight” (for lack of a better word) paradigm, what takes its place as the radical outlier? Maybe “kink” is the new “queer”; […] I don’t think it’s erroneous to draw parallels to gay liberation, when a minority sexuality community decided it was going to establish its own boundaries (or lack thereof), and not allow the law or the medical profession or anyone else to do that for them.

I also frequently cite and share Emma’s KinkForAll Boston presentation (shown above), “Defining ‘Kink’,” in which she says:

The idea that [kink] “practitioner[s] are … considered perverts by ‘outsiders’” either conflates Kink with BDSM and nothing else, or conflates it with Fetishism [but i]f we hold Kink to its definition as “a term used to refer to an intelligent and playful usage of sexual concepts” how can it become a pejorative that turns people into “perverts”?

In other words, certain colloquial usages of “kink” that are used to draw a line in the sand—to draw the speaker’s preferred line in the sand—reify the hegemonic formulation of sex as dichotomized into obscene or decent acts. Emma goes on to say:

We know as well about what Kink shouldn’t be – exclusionary, prejudicing. Kink is not BDSM and BDSM alone. In fact, there’s no reason that Kink should necessarily be opposed to conventional sex – think of it as Sex 201. […] One can do Kink just by talking, one can have a Kink just by knowing enough to know what it is that really gets your motor going.

When I have conversations like this with people, bringing this point up inevitably raises a frustrating question: “If one can ‘do kink’ just by talking, what do you say to be kinky?” It’s frustrating because it’s the wrong question, still caged in the antiquated notion that kink is what you do instead of why (or how) you’re doing it. It implicitly creates an “other” category based on activity, just as gays are currently demonized by bigots for belonging to an “other/not-straight” category of self-identity.

At the recent CARAS conference I attended, Dr. Marty Klein’s keynote touched heavily on the topic of “othering” with regards to sexuality narratives in culture. He writes:

The general impression of kinky people is that they are a special, identifiable group, different from the schoolteachers, dentists, grocery clerks, and bus drivers we encounter every day. Different from “us.” And unlike “us,” dangerous.

This idea hurts everyone.

[…]

“Kinky sex” is a vague, flexible category—and sexuality is by its very nature ambiguous. If you tingle when you’re playfully spanked, are you “kinky?” […A]s “kinky sex” and its practitioners are demonized, everyone is concerned—am I one of “those people?”

[…]

I’d like to destroy the idea of binary contrast—that kinky and non-kinky sex are clearly different.

Instead, I suggest that kinky and vanilla sex are parts of a continuum, the wide range of human eroticism. We all slide side to side along that continuum during our lives, sometimes in a single week.

(Emphasis mine.)

There’s a subtlety in the way he uses the word “kink” that many other sexuality educators don’t seem to pick up on. He isn’t using it as a synonym for any other word. He doesn’t use it as a literary device to inject variety when he’s talking about some specific activity like “spanking” (or caning, or flogging…). He doesn’t even use it to refer to a uniform group of people.

I believe very strongly that sexuality educators must develop an understanding of “kinky” that honors its inherent heterogeneity. Its diversity offers immense cultural power. Pigeonholing “kink” is a disservice to already-self-defined groups, but especially to those people in the equally-nebulous “mainstream” who desire “kinky things,” but who think of such things as, say, strap-on or anal sex.¹

More plainly, ask a BDSMer if they think strap-on sex is “kinky” and the answer is often no. Ask a “vanilla” college student the same question and the answer is almost always “yes.” That’s a telling and important difference and I urge us to honor that reality, for our own benefit, and the benefit of the sexual freedom movement as a whole.

As Dr. Klein says:

Some people like being emotional outlaws. They’ll always find a way to get the frisson of otherness. But most people don’t want to live that way.

I don’t. Do you?

1. I keep hearing some BDSM’ers, in their devout isolationism, question this usage. But my observations are, in fact, accurate. See, for example, “kinky” expressly used as a term for anal sex at the end of this article at Slate.

One night last week, I was mugged on the street. Although I took a blow to the throat and I had my bag, my laptop, and some other personal affects stolen, I was also very lucky. You see, I was mugged right underneath a street lamp, and since the corner I was standing on was very brightly lit, after the muggers grabbed my bag they bolted to the shadows as fast as they could.

While it was a rattling experience, it also highlighted a principle I intuitively already knew: criminals hate light. They don’t want to be seen, and light makes what they do more visible. In other words, it makes their activity more transparent.

Transparency is, briefly, the combination of accessibility and accountability. Accessibility is the characteristic of some bit of knowledge being available to all interested parties; having access to information. Accountability is the capability for an action to be traced to its actor; knowing who did what, and when.

For obvious reasons, accountability is a horrible thing for criminals but it should, at least in theory, be a great thing for law enforcement, activists, good Samaritans, and anyone else who wants to strengthen civil society. One way to better understand this is to look at accountability’s opposite: scapegoating.

In M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie, scapegoating is explained:

A predominant characteristic…of the behavior of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at any one who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection.

So what does transparency have to do with activism? To answer that question, let me tell you a short story about Craigslist.

A Short History of Craigslist

In 2007, Craigslist is arguably the most popular classifieds service in the world, but there is no “Adult Services” section. Instead, an “Erotic Services” category that has existed for well over 5 years offers users the opportunity to post classifieds for free. The zero-dollar price tag undercuts similar erotic services classifieds being sold by mainstream newspapers and other online businesses by, well, infinity.

In March of 2009, a man by the name of Phillip Markoff kills a masseuse advertising on Craigslist, and is quickly apprehended thanks to digital sleuthing in cooperation with Craigslist. However, Markoff is dubbed “The Craigslist Killer” by the media and Craigslist’s CEO along with its founder, Craig Newmark, become political whipping boys.

Two months later, in May, under pressure from certain feminist and human rights advocacy groups, as well as numerous attorneys general, Craigslist replaces the Erotic Services section with “Adult Services” and begins charging for the ads. It is believed that creating a paper trail with transactions through the website will further aid police in quickly identifying any criminal activity by users of the website. Sure enough, it does, and in April of 2010 the police win a major bust against the Gambino mafia family after they posted ads on Craigslist’s Adult Services section offering sex with underage girls.

Despite Craigslist’s cooperation in this and other investigations, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and others issued a subpoena to Craigslist in May of 2010, only 1 month after the Gambino family bust, alleging that the company was facilitating and profiting off child “sex trafficking” and slavery. Over the next few months, so-called “anti-trafficking” groups, like the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women led by Norma Ramos, along with anti-prostitution groups, like Prostitution Research and Education led by Melissa Farley, grow increasingly loud, staging protests outside Craigslist’s San Francisco offices.

In September of 2010—that’s this month—Craigslist removes the “Adult Services” section entirely under pressure from these same groups, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, and 16 other attorneys general, 13 of whom, including Blumenthal, are up for reelection this year. (No, that’s not a coincidence.)

How “anti-trafficking” is often code for “pro-censorship”

Here’s the thing: the overly-hyped “sex trafficking” scare is possibly the largest, most evil, and most well-orchestrated myth of the abolitionist “feminist” movement. The propaganda spewing from groups like The Rebecca Project is unmistakable. Their wildly inflated numbers would be laughable if they weren’t so mindlessly regurgitated as facts by the mainstream media.

According to The Rebecca Project’s executive director, Malika Saada Saar, “An estimated 100,000-300,000 American children are at risk for becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation.” Critical thinkers like Dr. Marty Klein call this out for what it is:

“At risk!” Not in any way harmed, just vulnerable! The technical word for this is “nonsense.”

Make no mistake: the scare tactics used by groups like The Rebecca Project are deliberately designed to manipulate public policy by disguising a moral crusade to prohibit voluntary prostitution—sex work—as though it were a grassroots effort to combat sex trafficking. And they’re not even being coy about it.

At an international gathering of anti-porn activists in Cambridge in May, 2010, a “National Planning Meeting to Eliminate Demand for Commercial Sex” was sponsored by the Embrey Family Foundation and the Hunt Alternatives Fund. Starting at the very first sentences of the very first paragraph on the very first page of the PDF report, the trafficking boogeyman is trotted out:

Most public and private resources dedicated to human trafficking in the past decade have been crisis oriented, understandably geared toward rescuing and rehabilitating victims and, to some extent, prosecuting the perpetrators. However, policymakers, academics, and activists increasingly recognize that the endless supply of victims won’t abate unless we combat the demand for trafficking.

Then on page 4, in a prominent pull-quote, lauded anti-prostitution activist, Guardian journalist, and feminist media fear-merchant Julie Bindel says:

We decided we wouldn’t make a distinction between women who are coerced and [women] who choose. If you try to make that distinction, you will get nowhere when focusing on demand.

Their agenda could not be more clear: it’s not about sex trafficking, it’s about prohibiting prostitution. This, despite the US State Department’s unambiguous exclusion of voluntary prostitution as a form of trafficking:

Prostitution by willing adults is not human trafficking regardless of whether it is legalized, decriminalized, or criminalized.

—Trafficking in Persons Report, 10^th Edition, page 8

It was perhaps Susie Bright who described people like Julie Bindel, Norma Ramos, and Melissa Farley best:

A casual observer may wonder … “Aren’t the Trafficking-Fighters just decent people trying to save the vulnerable and innocent?”

Uh, no.

[…T]he Hooverites who have called for the disembowelment of CL are a different breed. They do not give a rat’s ass about children’s rights, women’s victimization, or anything else. They are the same companies who sponsor “Palin-esque” candidates, Christian Lunacy funds, forced-birthers, racist smear campaigns, gay-hating crusades. What’s worse, their leaders are indifferent to their stated “issues”—they believe themselves to be a personal elite, so close to God and Money that what the “little people do” is not relevant to them.

You won’t find the anti-Porn, anti-Trafficking Activists in the domestic abuse shelter, the rape crisis hotline, the emergency room, the orphanage, the refugee camps. Heavens, no. They have no interest or knowledge of what goes on in the trenches. They are actively fighting sex workers all over the world who have articulated their needs and rights. They don’t want anyone to have any kind of sex they don’t sanction. They are FRAUDS.

At the online magazine Sex and the 405, Anaiis Flox says of Craigslist:

Over the past few days, I have noticed an increase in the number of ads that suggest a monetary exchange for sex.

This surprises absolutely nobody. Without an “Adult Services” section, the ads that used to populate that section, regardless of whether they were actually advertising legal activity or not, are now re-appearing elsewhere on Craigslist—y’know, the free sections without a paper trail. Leading anti-prostitution crusader Melissa Farley has already condemned Craigslist’s casual encounters section. Is that section next on the chopping block?

“Adult Services” classifieds are apparently the online feminist version of the Ground-Zero Mosque lunacy. Only the deluded are questioning the legality of Craigslist’s classifieds business itself because Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act is squarely on Craigslist’s side:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

This single sentence, means Craigslist isn’t generally liable for what its users do, probably…gave birth to Web 2.0 and modern social networks, and also protects Facebook, Blogspot, Flickr, and innumerable other Web sites. It lets news organizations…permit readers to post comments without prior approval by an editor, says technology industry expert Declan McCullagh.

In other words, if “Adult Services” classifieds are unacceptable in the section Craigslist was pressured to create for them, exactly where should they go? (Colbertslist?) Another online classifieds service, Backpage.com, has now been sued by the same anti-trafficking groups for the same reasons Craigslist was pursued. If Backpage.com also removes similar ads from its site, what’s to stop the very same content from reappearing on Facebook, Blogspot, Flickr, or innumerable other Web sites, and more importantly, what will the prohibitionists’ solution be?

Actually, we don’t need to guess. Malika Saada Saar, other groups like hers, and their criminally shortsighted Attorney General puppet Richard Blumenthal are already exploring revisiting Section 230:

“These prostitution ads enable human trafficking and assaults on women,” Blumenthal said […]. “Craigslist says it cannot be held legally responsible for anything on its site,” he said. “My belief is strongly … [sic] that we need to change that.”

This clearly shows that the issue of trafficking and sexual slavery is just window dressing for their real agenda: instituting content-based restrictions on anything that doesn’t meet their narrow religious or ideological view of sexual morality. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Norma Ramos, Co-Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women:

We at the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women see prostitution as the world’s oldest oppression and we see it as being at odds with any goal of achieving equality rights for women and girls.

Ms. Ramos and many purported “anti-trafficking” groups like the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, Donna M. Hughes’ Citizens Against Trafficking, and others are in no uncertain terms actually anti-prostitution and pro-censorship lobbying groups.

Pitting free speech against human rights is a recipe for disaster

Ironically, the people best-equipped to help law enforcement combat sex trafficking are sex workers, the same people Farley and other abolitionist feminists either demonize or discredit. Last week, the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) issued a press release:

Purported rights groups, such as Change.org, have ignored sex worker voices while wrongfully vilifying Craigslist as a cause of—rather than an ally in stopping—trafficking. The continued silencing of sex workers, the trend to shut down the spaces where we communicate and the disregard of our expert knowledge demonstrate clearly that these efforts are more about stomping out sex for sale in general than in protecting those who are actually abused.

They’re right. I only wish SWOP would have called Change.org propagandist Amanda Kloer out by name. It should surprise no one that it is sex workers, not these “human rights” groups, who are addressing the problem in a constructive way. And there are other forces at play here besides just the pro-censorship crusaders.

Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis notes that the mainstream media frenzy has been conspicuously silent on the fact that Craigslist is a direct competitor to their own classifieds business:

Since craigslist and the internet have existed, newspaper classified revenue has fallen by $13 billion a year. [...T]he law is on craigslist’s side even if its enforcers are not and that this is a matter of free speech, which should put The Times and its journalists on craigslist’s side as well. But they’re not.

Jarvis is correct that as far as Craigslist, The Times, and other publishers are concerned, this is a free speech issue. But the question of trafficking is not a free speech issue. Trafficking is criminal coercion, which makes it distinctly different than all legal “Adult Services,” and even different from the currently-criminal activity of prostitution.

Conflating sex trafficking with prostitution is a prime example of what Dr. Marty Klein calls a phony category:

It’s a common strategy in public policy discussions—creating a category that lumps two dissimilar things together, and decrying the more serious of the two. We’re all in favor of preventing hangnails and heart attacks, aren’t we? We MUST do something about that!

Public discussions of sex suffer dramatically from this treatment. Morality groups, the media, and politicians often complain about the ‘serious problem of x & y.’ Even worse, they’ll say ‘the rate of x & y is increasing,’ without admitting how much of each is involved.

This tendency is glaringly obvious in any examination of the media’s hysterics surrounding online classifieds and sex trafficking.

The Guardian:

Thousands of ads continue to be placed each day that list charges for encounters. Many include…flags for underage prostitution.

The Chicago Tribune:

…there is growing evidence of human trafficking, child exploitation and prostitution through ads on the website.

And of course, the Attorneys General own letter:

The increasingly sharp public criticism of Craigslist’s Adult Services section reflects a growing recognition that ads for prostitution — including ads trafficking children — are rampant on it.

Sex trafficking, a subset of human trafficking, is estimated by all credible reports such as the ones by the International Labour Organization to be around 10 percent of all trafficking crimes. That means 9 times more people are trafficked for non-sexual forced labor (slavery) than for sexual purposes. And yet leaders of these so-called human rights groups have the audacity to all but flat-out deny the very existence of labor trafficking. To wit, founder of the misnamed Prostitution Education and Research organization, Melissa Farley, offers this analysis on page 176 of her book, Prostitution, trafficking, and traumatic stress:

In order to defend prostitution as sex work, trafficking was articulated as gender-neutral, with labor trafficking and sex trafficking collapsed under the same rubric as ‘trafficking in persons.’ Otherwise it would be too evident that the ultimate harm of sex trafficking is the decidedly gendered condition in which the trafficking victim is transported into—prostitution.

So why does the media along with abolitionist feminists so consistently tie “trafficking” with sex trafficking, despite it being only one-tenth of trafficking crimes? I think, and this is disturbing, because it’s “sexy”; that is, it gets publishers like The Times page views, it offers politicians a politically expedient opportunity for grandstanding, and it gives pro-censorship crusaders like Farley a way to evade critical scrutiny. As Anaiis Flox argues:

How many of you people who are so up in arms about the exploited have marched with the Student/Farmworker Alliance? Boycotted Burger King when they refused to pay an extra penny for tomatoes so that consumers could ensure no debt peonage came at the expense of their burgers? How many know what the Coalition of Immokalee Workers does?

“No one really cares about Mexican dudes working in kitchens,” said sex educator and sex worker activist Audacia Ray in a recent interview with sexuality netcast Kink On Tap. She’s right. They don’t.

Indeed, these abolitionist feminists are so wrapped up in prohibiting prostitution that they are not only damaging the safety of sex workers but actively destroying law enforcement’s best tools to stop sex trafficking by driving the trade underground. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, they are also diverting public attention and resources from the human rights abuses of 90 percent—90 percent!—of human trafficking crimes.

Danah Boyd, social media researcher and Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society unequivocally condemned the anti-Craigslist crusaders:

If I believed that censoring Craigslist would achieve [justice], I’d be the first in line to watch them fall. But from the bottom of my soul and the depths of my intellect, I believe that the current efforts to censor Craigslist’s “adult services” achieves the absolute opposite. Rather than helping those who are abused, it fundamentally helps pimps, human traffickers and others who profit off of abusing others. […] Craigslist is not a pimp, but a public perch from which law enforcement can watch without being seen.

Visibility serves many important purposes in advocacy. Not only does it motivate people to act, but it also shines a spotlight on every person involved in the issue at hand. In the case of nonconsensual prostitution and human trafficking, this means that those who are engaged in these activities aren’t so deeply underground as to be invisible. They’re right there. And while they feel protected by the theoretical power of anonymity and the belief that no one can physically approach and arrest them, they’re leaving traces of all sorts that make them far easier to find than most underground criminals.

In other words, anti-prostitution activists leading the charge in attacking Craigslist are doing nothing other than scapegoating—they’re perpetrating evil. Their behavior falls squarely in the category of anti-justice.

Transparency—visibility—is the single strongest weapon against corruption. By implying that censorship is a required property for gender equality through their manipulation of public discourse about these nuanced but ultimately very simple issues, abolitionist feminists are contributing to the corruption they claim to be ending.

To quote Danah Boyd again:

Taking something that is visible and making it invisible makes a politician look good, even if it does absolutely nothing to help the victims who are harmed. It creates the illusion of safety, while signaling to pimps, traffickers, and other scumbags that their businesses are perfectly safe as long as they stay invisible.

No one is saying that a conversation about the merits or demerits of prostitution or about the much-needed efforts to stop trafficking crimes shouldn’t take place. But justice won’t be served by having one conversation instead of the two very different ones that need to be had here. And for all their specious assertions of being human rights advocates, it is the loudest anti-Craigslist voices who are turning off the proverbial lamps on our street corners and running into the shadows.

That’s why I continue to receive numerous personal, private, correspondence from people of all genders, backgrounds, ages, and concerns who are uncomfortable about speaking non-anonymously. These folks have already made a leap of faith merely by emailing me (emails are not anonymous), yet what they have to say is so vital, is so important, and I believe is so prevalent that not sharing these “private conversations” publicly routinely pains me. I frequently ask for permission to publish these exchanges (even though I consider anything that comes to my inbox fair game for public blogging) out of respect for the concerns of others, regardless of my personal inclination towards radical transparency.

This stockpile of personal correspondence, the things these “garden-variety,” “normal,” even “vanilla” people tell me about themselves and their lives in one-on-one conversation that they would not feel comfortable sharing more publicly is evidence of the reality that “the moral majority” is simply a misnomer. They are, in fact, merely one very vocal minority. And, what’s more, so am I—I am a different vocal minority.

Since it will always be easier to destroy, to shame, to hate, than it will be to create, to empower, and to love, my challenge is to prove to the silent majority how necessary their voices and their actions really are. Until some perceived heretic such as myself can stand up to the monster of cultural shaming, to challenge the tyranny of “common sense,” and to expose the enraging and despicable lies activist academics peddle as fact, the silent majority will remain silenced by the vocal minorities fighting to maintain the cultural, religious, and economic status-quo.

On that note, here’s one such (slightly edited) exchange that I think is eye-opening with regards to its under-reported, and perhaps unacknowledged, prevalence. Like many others, this person prefers to remain anonymous because their “views have the potential to piss just about every camp off.” (That’s rarely been on my list of reasons why not to do something, but I respect the sentiment.)

So without further ado, here’s the closest thing to a guest post I’ve published on this blog:

Maymay,

I can finally sit down and write you an email on some of the thoughts I’ve had while reading your posts. Let’s start with the Submissive Man in 2007:

I wanted to write about why many submissive men are just as responsible for debasing their own sexuality as the many pro- (and so obviously not-so-pro-)dommes who take delight in squashing them down while lifting them of that burdensome weight in their wallets. (“Thank you for stealing my money, Mistress, would you like another dollar?”)

There seems to be this strange notion in femdom that women are superior to men. As a fantasy, I can kink on that notion for perhaps a two minute stretch at a time (perhaps longer with a visual like something by Sardax) before I discard it at as silly (for me). I’m not a loser. I’m not a worm. I’m not a piggy. I’m not worthless. I’m not a maid. I’m not a handyman. And I’m not a wallet. These notions of male submission don’t resonate with me at all. In fact, I think my submission to a woman has a special meaning because I’m awesome; the type of submission I do when I’m submissive is not necessarily “better,” but it is different, and it is under-represented.

There are tons of internet femdoms urging me to prove how worthless I am to please them; why not femdoms urging me to prove how awesome I am to please them?

I certainly don’t want to step on other people’s fantasies, yet there comes a problem when certain fantasies can’t be distinguished from reality, and when certain fantasies marginalize others (like mine). Sexual dominance really isn’t necessarily the same thing as status superiority; just because I often want women to have the former, it doesn’t mean I believe them to hold the latter.

Like you, the other thing I have trouble relating to is paying money for “financial domination”, “tribute”, or “sessions,” at least not in typical contexts. As a student of seduction for many years, I want people to do stuff with me because they are enthusiastic about it. I want people to want me. If someone doesn’t want me enough to do something with me without any exchange of money, then they don’t want them as much as I would want them to want me.

I originally figured out some of the problems with males attempting to exchange money for female sexuality from the seduction community, in posts like these.

By the cultural default, paying money implies that I am inadequate in intrinsic desirability, and that I must “sweeten the deal” financially to make up for this inadequacy. I do not accept that framing of the situation at all! If I’m not desirable enough for someone to want to be sexual with me without me having to include extrinsic incentives outside their enjoyment of the activity, then we are really not a good fit.

An important lesson I’ve learned is that a lot of the status that people give me depends on how much status I act like I have. Similarly, people seem to treat me as more desirable when I act like I’m desirable, and when I act in a way that shows that I believe that they will find me desirable.

Yet if I offer someone money for a sexual experience, I am acting as if I believe that I’m less desirable to her than she is to me; my belief in my lower desirability will then serve as evidence to her that she should also believe that I have lower desirability. By the same logic, I understand your ambivalence about pro-dommes asking you to session with them. If I received such a suggestion, I would be offended inside, because it would imply that she saw me as less desirable than I saw her, and that she considered it acceptable to rub that perception in my face and have me be thankful for a chance for an asymmetrical interaction with her. Thanks, but no thanks.

I would argue that pro-dommes (and non-pro) are also being short-changed by these exchange metaphors in their own dating lives. They (and men who approach them as potential lovers) are used to accepting a metaphor which devalues the man’s desirability. I’m currently seeing a pro-domme. She asked me out after we got talking…but I wonder what would have happened if instead I had followed one of the standard submissive scripts and asked to be her slave, pay her tribute, worship her, or session with her. There is a good chance I would have destroyed my desirability for her, and we wouldn’t now be enjoying experiences that she charges other men hundreds of dollars for in “sessions.”

Since I want people to want me, I go to great lengths to make myself attractive to people I’m seeing. Getting ready can take me several hours, and even more if I’m going out as a girl. As a student of
seduction, I enjoy using my knowledge of sexuality and psychology to create mutually-enjoyable situations. Sometimes, I view the images and interactions I create as a form of power, and sometimes I view them as a form of service; these views are not mutually-exclusive. With people I go out with, part of my effort to create an attractive image and enjoyable interaction involves avoiding and ruthlessly shutting down interpersonal dynamics that undermine my desirability or value as a person; this could be construed as a service.

Since I believe that a lot of stereotypical male submission dynamics and scripts will undermine my desirability and value in even a dommes’ eyes (including, but not limited to, forms of financial exchange), I am forced to reject them in order to maintain a mutually pleasing and sustainable interaction. For me, the best way to “serve” (to the extent that the notion of service resonates with me) is to reject the stereotypical, self-undermining notions of service that are associated with the devaluing of submissive male sexuality. I serve the relationship, and I serve the other person through my service to the relationship, even if this service involves me rejecting tempting cultural scripts, rejecting certain dynamics or tests from the other person that I judge as harmful to the long-term health of the relationship, not necessarily giving them everything they want when they want it, asserting myself, presenting strong opinions, being challenging, or saying “no” or “not yet.”

I’m really grateful for all the personal correspondence I’ve gotten and I hope it continues. I also hope that more such correspondence—in whatever form it takes—encourages people to open themselves up a bit more than they otherwise would. Although this exchange was about a topic germane to BDSM and, therefore, this blog, I’ve had similar exchanges with self-described “normal people” who held “unpopular,” “under-culture,” or just plain “perverted” views.

And you might be surprised to learn how many of them came from doctrinal socially conservative or religious backgrounds.

You guys are the silent majority. I’m a bullhorn, a loud voice, maybe a lighthouse doing my best to shine light onto an otherwise dark and rocky shore of a corrosive and repressive hegemony. But I’m not the meat of the matter, you are. What will it take for more of you to speak up and speak out?

When it comes to anti-porn activism, sex sells. At the briefing, Wheelock College professor Gail Dines becomes perhaps the first person to utter the words “cum dumpster” at a Capitol Hill press event. Over the past 20 years, Dines has made a living observing such degradations. As the crowd picks at fruit plates, she rattles off a selection of titles she’s researched, such as Anally Ripped Whores and Gag on My Cock.

Where Maymay displays spreadsheets, the porn critics on Capitol Hill show pictures.

I encourage you to read the whole thing. It’s very succinct, and all told I think quite fair.

Last week, Amanda contacted me and asked me some questions for her story in an email. I want to share that email here because I think comparing and contrasting the published article with the email interview is illustrative for anyone who finds themselves in a spotlight.

OK, here are my questions for you:

1. First off, are you comfortable with me printing your full name?

Yes, but I’d strongly prefer you to use my more well-known pseudonym, ‘maymay.’ I’m not asking this because my real name is hidden or because I’m not “out” in any way, but you and I both know how much work online reputation management is, and I’d appreciate your assistance in helping me keep the quality of life online I currently have.

2. How about your age?

Go for it. I’m 25.

3. Donna M. Hughes’ and Margaret Brooks’ bulletin suggested that some people had warned you that your ideas on Kink-for-All being open to the public could get you labeled as a “pedophile.” Had you ever been labeled a “pedophile” before that bulletin was sent out?

No. The first instance of those accusations was a direct result of Donna M. Hughes’ and Margaret Brooks’ bulletin.

4. Some background on the first KFADC: What inspired the relocation from Bethesda Chevy-Chase high school to the Montgomery County Executive Office Building?

First off, let me say I’m no more privy to those conversations than anyone else is. The relocation is well-documented in the KinkForAll mailing list archives, where it was announced—that’s how I learned about the relocation. The KinkForAll mailing list and its archives are intentionally public in an effort to keep KinkForAll as a community as transparent, accessible, and accountable as possible.

Anyway, for the nitty-gritty about the relocation, see this thread: http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall/browse_thread/thread/22853a9dc1f73131/d4ba9972d600038e

Quoting from Nikolas, Basically, the school board is prepared to make a big deal [legally and politically] about KinkForAll being at the school. […] One part of their argument is that there’s an increased chance of sex offenders being present on school grounds […] They are also invoking the school’s responsibility to shield children from material they deem inappropriate.

Obviously, I feel that the school board’s concerns are misguided, and I find it interesting that the concerns they cited are exactly the same concerns Donna M. Hughes, Margaret Brooks and other critics of KinkForAll cite in an unsuccessful attempt to paint the event as “obscene” and “a danger to the community” in which it is held. The similarity of the concerns showcase the necessity for a more judicious attitude not merely about KinkForAll, but sexuality as a whole. I spoke about the first KinkForAll Washington DC’s relocation and its wider implications on the perception of youth sexuality at that event. The video of my presentation is available online, and has received more than 3,000 views in a matter of months:

http://vimeo.com/7783159

I think it’s unfortunate that some people jump to horrific conclusions about our community-based sexuality education initiative without doing basic research such as attending one of the events themselves. I mean, the unconferences are designed to be very accessible; they’re totally free.

5. In Boston, what inspired the move from the University of Massachusetts-Boston to Boston University?

Once again, I don’t have any special knowledge here. All of the information I have is publicly available on the mailing list. In this case, the thread you should read is here: http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall/browse_thread/thread/d90859b29f491e1d/0409ff624bc21cca

I asked for this information in the thread: It would also be beneficial if Trish or whoever else has details about what *exactly* happened and also *why* UMass Boston is pulling out could share that information in writing[…].

The person who secured the original venue in the first place, Trish, said this in another email in the same thread: “There was a regime change in administration/coordination over the summer, and the commitments to give space to the old regime were not honored by the new regime.”

That’s all the information I have because that’s all the information on the mailing list. I again stress that I rely on the same sources that the public does for information about KinkForAll because those sources are one and the same. This is why KinkForAll is so transparent and so honest—the processes we use for producing unconferences are the exact same ones we use to document our activities and share them with the world. For more details on this venue change, you’ll have to ask UMass directly, or at least ask Trish.

Despite the fact that KinkForAll Boston lost its confirmed venue 8 days before the unconference was to be held, the unconference received no less than 3 alternative offers within a matter of days. Boston University was the venue ultimately chosen and the event was a wonderful success.

I think that this instance was a remarkable example of how KinkForAll really shines: the agility of the unconference model coupled with the passion of the unorganizers empowered the community to handle this major unforeseen hurdle with grace and speed. The host of KinkForAll Boston was the Women’s Resource Center at Boston University, the leader of which personally commented to me about how inspired she was and asked if future KinkForAll unconferences would be held at Boston University. I told her what I tell everyone who asks me that: KinkForAll happens whenever you want it to happen. If you want to have one, join the KinkForAll mailing list and ask for help unorganizing one yourself. :)

6. You’ve blogged about attempting to contact Hughes and Brooks about the bulletin. Did they ever respond to your requests?

A few days after Donna M. Hughes’ and Margaret Brooks’ bulletin was distributed by the Salvation Army’s Initiative Against Sexual Trafficking listserve, I wrote a blog post directly addressing their concerns about KinkForAll unconferences, but I have yet to hear any response from them despite numerous personal invitations to dialogue. Go figure. That blog post is here:

http://maybemaimed.com/2010/03/27/addressing-donna-m-hughes-and-margaret-brooks-concerns-over-kinkforall-unconferences/

I even personally invited both Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks to join the KinkForAll mailing list so that they could air their concerns to the community directly. I promised to help them liaise with the KinkForAll community at large and also reminded them that approaching our community as though it and I were one and the same devalued the contributions of the many committed unorganizers who actually produced most of the events. To date, I never saw a response either to my inbox or to the KinkForAll mailing list.

My correspondence to (and frustratingly not with) them are public, on my blog and on the KinkForAll mailing list, linked above and here: http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall/browse_thread/thread/4020d397e88241ed/d129d5809c3a34d5#msg_0a2e3a25e924124a

Moreover, I think it’s worth pointing out that several other KinkForAll participants, notably KinkForAll Providence unorganizer Aida Manduley, also emailed Margaret Brooks, Donna M. Hughes, and their collaborator Melanie Shapiro personally. In addition to KinkForAll Providence, Aida organized a panel discussion at Brown University and invited all three academics to attend, but none of them did. Aida gave me permission to reprint her email to them, which I blogged about (along with information about the panel event, at which I spoke), here:

http://maybemaimed.com/2010/04/23/panel-at-brown-university-when-educators-are-censors/

Naturally, I recorded the panel session in case Donna M. Hughes, Margaret Brooks, or Melanie Shapiro might want to refer to the event after-the-fact, as they’d done to other events I’ve participated in previously. You can watch that video here:

http://maybemaimed.com/2010/05/08/certain-unalienable-rights/

As far as I’m aware, not one KinkForAll participant who has attempted to engage with these academics has received so much as an email reply. However, Donna M. Hughes and her colleagues have continued to publish misleading information about me, personally and by name, in more of their bulletins.

7. How do you feel about the anti-porn conferences recently held in Boston and D.C.? Can KFA attendees and anti-porn attendees find common ground somewhere?

If what anti-porn activists say can be believed, then I think KinkForAll participants and anti-porn conference attendees have the same goals. Dr. Gail Dines, who addressed Congress this past Tuesday, plainly said that porn has become the main source of sex education for boys and girls (and, presumably, differently-gendered young people who, y’know, also need sex education). This is one of the many problems that KinkForAll was carefully designed to address. Both KinkForAll participants and anti-porn activists want to see a world in which erotica intended to titillate rather than educate is NOT the primary source of sex education for anyone, young or old, because both groups fiercely believe that such material is not well-suited for the task of education.

Interestingly, KinkForAll Washington DC 2 was held the same day as Gail Dines’ Stop Porn Culture (SPC) conference, on June 12^th, 2010. Several KinkForAll participants, including KinkForAll Providence unorganizer Aida Manduley and presenter Megan Andelloux, attended the SPC event where Donna M. Hughes was a prominent speaker. This resulted in some remarkable conversation on Twitter as the events’ hashtags intermingled, and I was heartened by Megan’s and Aida’s outreach. Their relentlessly respectful behavior in the face of what I can only describe as sheer contempt for their beliefs (Aida tweeted that Donna M. Hughes refused even to shake her hand) served to highlight the differences in KinkForAll participants’ mindsets versus those of anti-porn activists, and I hope I’ll continue to see positive change come from Aida and Megan’s efforts on that day.

8. Why do you think KFA scares some people?

KinkForAll acknowledges personal agency and engenders personal empowerment, two things that frighten every group that forces victimhood onto people, as anti-trafficking activists (such as Donna M. Hughes) often do to sex workers, and that anti-porn activists (such as Gail Dines) often do to men and women at large.

Moreover, KinkForAll’s principles, which presume everyone who participates regardless of race, creed, religion, age, (dis)ability, economic standing, sexual orientation, or gender has something of value to contribute, and its prioritizing of accessibility and serendipity by doing away with things like registration tickets and scheduling approval is a radical departure from more traditional conference and learning styles that many people, especially academics, are comfortable with. And we’ve all seen people fear what they find uncomfortable. So, I think KinkForAll scares the people mired in their fears rather than reaching for their dreams, and I think it appeals to optimistic people more likely to see possibility and diversity in uncertainty, rather than seeing persecution and disempowerment wherever they look.

I hope that one day, the people scared of KinkForAll—and possibly even me by association—will feel intrigued and safe enough to attend one of the unconferences, where they’ll be greeted with a smile and a handshake.

9. Why is it important to broadcast as much info about the KFA proceedings online as possible?

First and foremost, KinkForAll offers an unprecedented opportunity to improve sexuality resources of all kinds, especially educational ones. Recording media such as videos and audio and publishing them online free for the world creates a distributed yet well-organized library of discussions, presentations, lectures, online workshops, and more about all kinds of sexuality-related issues ranging from technology to health and beyond.

When people like Wisconsin DA Scott Southworth can threaten schoolteachers with imprisonment merely for following laws about sex education, I think broadcasting the crowd-sourced and novel discussions that happen at KinkForAll unconferences is more important than ever! Self-righteous morality crusaders actively undermine the efforts of accredited sex educators like Megan Andelloux (similarly targeted by Donna M. Hughes as I was) who are trying to help people overcome horrific social stigmas and devastating legal, medical, or other battles just to live free of oppression. I think supporting a grass-roots, public-domain infrastructure for inspiring conversations about the intersection of sexuality and the rest of life, as KinkForAll does, is vital to keep fear and intolerance about our sexual selves at bay.

Also, quite plainly, recording and broadcasting or documenting not just the unconference proceedings but everything else involved with it is useful when someone like you asks me about what happened, when, and why. This transparency has been an incredibly powerful shield of protection because being able to call up relevant information from a publicly archived space, and knowing that it’s accurate as it can be corroborated by anyone at any time, makes it ridiculously easy to fight claims of wrongdoing. Such accusations simply can not stand up to the facts, which everyone has equal and easy insight into. :)

Of course, not everyone feels safe being video recorded because, in society’s fevered fear of sexuality, they might lose a job or custody of their children just for being seen at a KinkForAll unconference. That’s why KinkForAll participants pay careful attention to issues of personal privacy and, among other things, supply a simple red (or sometimes bright orange) sticker that can be worn to signal one’s preference not to be photographed or video recorded. I’m saddened that the cultural fear of sex that activists and academics like Donna M. Hughes, Margaret Brooks, Gail Dines and numerous others closely associated with the anti-porn movement perpetuate still causes so much suffering. Many people worry about their safety and wellbeing, just because they’re kinky, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or intersex, or because they have any fetish at all, or because they sometimes watch porn, or because someone thinks they’re “addicted” to sex or masturbation, or, in the case of young people especially, because they’re merely trying to learn about their body.

Nevertheless, I’m hopeful that once enough media is out there, its ripple effect will make being and celebrating who we are safer than hiding who we are. Because in reality, as I learned first hand, the closet is not a safe place to be, no matter how much more uncomfortable coming out might feel at first.

And anything else you’d like to say about either KFA or the anti-porn initiatives: I’m all ears.

Amanda

I think anti-porn initiatives are a smoke-screen for real issues that affect society, real issues such as the stigmas of STIs like herpes, paranoia over youth sexuality, and legal, personal and political implications of sex blogging—real issues that KinkForAll participants are addressing in increasingly creative and empowering ways both at the unconferences themselves and in their daily lives. None of these problems will disappear with the disappearance of pornography, even if pornography were their root cause, an anti-porn activists’ claim for which there is absolutely no evidence despite decades upon decades of religiously-backed drum-banging.

I think we all need to be careful not to get distracted from the important work of making the world a more sexually healthy place by red-herring rhetoric and faulty research such as that of Stop Porn Culture. Gail Dines, her organization, and her colleagues blatantly misdirect conversation and use language and visuals calculated to trigger an emotional response of fear and anger in her audience, just as Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks did in their bulletins about me. These people consistently (and I dare say deliberately) ignore the diversity of both erotic imagery and real encounters—Gail Dines made no mention of pornography that does not include women, of which there is plenty in the form of gay male erotica for instance, in her speech on Tuesday—and disingenuously claim to speak for the women who they work so hard to silence, such as the countless sex workers whose lives are devastated by unwanted “rescues”.

So I think that people and feminists in particular need to be ever-vigilant not to let the language of feminism and gender equality be co-opted in order to support anti-women policies, to justify discrimination or censorship, or to enable the imposition of self-righteous moral or religious doctrine on anyone, ever.

Moreover, I think that the information age has made it more critical than ever that people develop information literacy and critical thinking skills. We’re all just people with websites. Go make up your own mind.

Cheers,
-maymay

Two things struck me as I was preparing my reply to Amanda.

First, her questions were incredibly pointed, and it was difficult for me to come up with short answers. I grew increasingly impressed with Amanda’s obvious intellect the more I analyzed the questions. Although she offered to speak with me on the phone in addition to sending me an email with her questions, I chose the email because I knew I’d be busy at my day job.

Looking back on our exchange, I’m glad I asked for an email instead of a phone call because I’m far more eloquent in writing than I am in speech, as regular listeners to Kink On Tap surely know. I had the opportunity to ask for some input from people close to me, including Aida and Emma, who were a great help in getting my thoughts organized enough to make my points clearly.

Second, I noticed that the column Amanda wrote included no content directly from our email exchange. This reifies what I already knew: you do not get to tell the story you want to tell when you speak to news outlets of any sort, whether large and well-known or small and self-published. Instead, you only get to influence it. If you want to tell your story, you damn well better tell it yourself.

It should be noted that Amanda was surely working under both time and length constraints, among others. I thank her for writing her piece, and for being the only journalist I know of to do so after attending a KinkForAll unconference and experiencing it in person, albeit for only a portion of the day. If only KinkForAll’s detractors would show us that courtesy…. (You know who you are.)

Leading the crusade against open discussions about sexuality is Professor of Women’s Studies at University of Rhode Island Donna M. Hughes and her collaborator Margaret Brooks (a Brown alumna), who were both personally invited to attend the panel discussion event. Neither of them have responded to the (months-long and repeated) invitations for constructive dialogue nor did either attend the panel. While I’m disappointed I didn’t get to speak with these women personally, I’m extremely grateful to SHEEC, Brown University, and their staff for giving me the chance to speak with the really intelligent participants who did show up to ask questions. The event ran for about 2 hours, and the entire panel has been recorded and is freely viewable online.

Below is an 8 minute video highlighting my presentation, titled Certain Unalienable Rights, which I sincerely hope Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks see one day, if they haven’t already.

Certain Unalienable Rights: Freedom of Expression and Sexuality in the Name of Liberty by maymay on Ustream.

Download:

• Certain Unalienable Rights keynote presentation as a ZIP archive.
• Certain Unalienable Rights keynote presentation as a PDF document.
• Certain Unalienable Rights keynote presentation as a text transcript.

Again, I am deeply grateful to SHEEC Chairperson Aida Manduley, my fellow panelists, especially Ricky Gresh, Senior Director for Student Engagement at Brown University, panel moderator Professor Jim Greene, and the rest of the faculty and all the students who supported SHEEC events in the past and will continue to do so in the future. I think you are doing important and necessary work in standing against the harmful stigma perpetuating a dangerous belief that speaking openly about sexuality is something to fear. It is not.

With that in mind, below is the full transcript of my presentation. You can also find highlights of Megan’s speech, Comprehensive Sex Education: Talking about the Taboo, Reid’s introduction, Aida’s talk about the college Sex Week phenomenon, Ricky Gresh’s introduction, and the rest of the panel video recorded on my Ustream channel.

This picture of women arranged in rows, like sculptures wearing Burkas, makes me feel pretty angry.

This picture of women’s bodies on display at newsstands across America also makes me feel pretty angry.

Both pictures cut straight to the core of an issue so central to humanity’s existence that religions, governments, and ideologies have made efforts to control what you and I say, want, and think in regards to it. I’m talking, of course, about sex.

In 2001, only a few hours from here at Wesleyan University, David Jay, founder of the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) said:

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

As a sexual freedom activist, I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about sex. That’s why David and other vocal asexuals absolutely fascinate me. Here is a group of people whose self-identity revolves around the lack of sexual attraction. After reading the work of people so different from myself, how could I not ask, “What is it that motivates us to do whatever it is that we do?”

In contemplating this, I kept getting drawn to this quote’s last sentence: “There’s no reason to focus your energy and attention on something you feel no reason to do anything about.” So why is it that some asexuals feel a reason to talk about sexuality as much as I, a “sexual person” does? Although it might sound corny, I think the answer is actually pretty clear: feelings.

In 2009, Eve Ensler, author of the Vagina Monologues and founder of V-Day, the international movement to end violence against women and girls, said:

Emotions have inherent logic which lead to radical, appropriate, saving action.

Now, in mathematics and linguistics, the word radical means “root,” as in “square root,” or “root of the word.” African American feminist and political activist Angela Davis famously said that, “Radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root.’”

So in other words, the root of radical action is emotion.

Now, this is important because the panel we’re about to have is in many ways about sex, and for many people, myself included, it’s difficult if not impossible to discuss sexuality separate from emotion. In fact, merely discussing sexuality openly is itself viewed by many people as a radical act and in some cases, empowering others to talk openly about sexuality is considered criminal. Myself and my friends on this panel have been called sexual predators, pedophiles, and human traffickers because of the things we’ve said, the discussion tools we’ve built, and the livelihoods we’ve created.

As before, I’m left asking, “What is it that motivates us to do whatever it is that we do?” And as I’ve been contemplating this over the past couple months, I’ve come to the realization that, despite how false and hurtful it is to hear these things said about you, it’s very important that these people have the right to voice their opinions.

This is a lesson that I know Brown University learned some time ago. On October 18, 1990, Brown undergraduate student Doug Hahn shouted racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic remarks on campus while drunk and celebrating his 21st birthday. That year, the Brown University Disciplinary Council (UDC) expelled Hahn for “hate speech,” which prompted the ACLU to object, citing First Amendment concerns.

It may jar you to learn that the ACLU would defend so-called “hate speech” under the First Amendment and, since words are exceptionally powerful things, I want to define “hate” before I get too far.

According to the dictionary, “hate” is the emotion of intense dislike; a feeling of dislike so strong that it demands action. To me, this says 2 things. First, it reminds me that, just like love, hate can be so powerful that it forces us to act in ways we wouldn’t have otherwise considered. Second, that both liking and disliking something are equally valid emotions to have regardless of the subject at hand.

For instance, I can’t stand using Windows-based computers, I do whatever I can to avoid the slush in New York City after it snows, and I hate going to pretentious art galleries! Now, I may hate these things, but you don’t have to hate them, too. That freedom—to choose what one likes or dislikes—is inborn to humanity. No matter what, no one can choose your desires for you.

Unquestionably, hate has been one of the driving forces behind human action throughout history, and I think, just as we do for love, we ought to credit it for that, not blame it. Action is what got us humans out of caves and into this spectacular structure called Brown University. (Maybe cavemen really hated caves?) Action is part of how society evolves; action is, after all, the root of activism.

Now, this right to choose how we feel, and what we hate, is what the Declaration of Independence calls “unalienable human rights.” In order to institutionalize the protection of these rights for themselves and future generations (that’s us!), people wrote a code of conduct we know as the Constitution of the United States. This institution is known as government, and its creation forged a distinction between “unalienable human rights” and other rights, such as political and legal rights.

As political theorist Hannah Arendt said, “Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the unalienable human rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence[...].”

In other words, government’s role is expressly intended to protect the liberty of its citizens, which, if we are to have liberty, must include the right to choose and express our likes and our dislikes no matter how vehemently we or others may feel about them.

In objecting to the expulsion of Douglas Hahn in 1991, a book critic for the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley, wrote this:

Of course it’s offensive—repugnant, contemptible, loathsome, whatever you want to call it—for a college student or anyone else to go into a public place and shout words such as those used by Douglas Hann in his little scene last fall. But displays such as that are among the prices we pay for being not merely a free country but one of unexampled heterogeneity.

Did Hahn deserve to face consequences for his behavior? Absolutely; he surely faced social repercussions as a consequence of his hateful speech, and I hope others’s obvious dislike of him had a positive impact. But his case shows that the freedom that you and I have to say what we want and think what we like is an incredibly precious gift that must be protected. That’s the foundation of freedom of speech.

Don’t get me wrong: I hate hate speech. I hate hating. And yet, there I am, hating it, hating how much I’m hating it and hating it for making me hate it! So if I continue to simplistically believe that hate has no value, how could I feel like a worthy person now? How could I forgive myself for feeling such hate? How could I learn to be joyous, and to love?

Maybe these people who hate have trouble seeing what a good and worthwhile person they are. While I was thinking about what I wanted to say to you today, someone I don’t even know responded to the blog posts I wrote about being called a sexual predator with this:

most of [your accusers] are probably really good people, just warped and made angry by fear and oppression themselves, but that doesn’t excuse perpetuating those fears and passing them on to others—it’s like the cycle of abuse—the buck has to stop somewhere.

Will it stop with you? I think all violence is an opportunity for growth; all hatred, opportunities for action. This is no different.

The last time I spoke at Brown University was at a sexuality conference called KinkForAll Providence. People with destructive goals, I said, are usually people who feel personally disempowered. So to be creative, you need to empower everyone to speak up, to have a presence—even people you don’t totally agree with.

In other words, the solution to “bad” speech is more speech, not less. In his 1999 talk, Censorship and the Fear of Sexuality, Dr. Marty Klein said:

Most Americans do not want to discuss sexual issues rationally. Their sexuality poisoned by the culture, they just want their emotional pain taken away. To people afraid of sexuality, censorship looks attractive. It appears to be a solution to the pain. This pain, this fear of sexuality, leads people to support censorship.

Sometimes when I talk about sex, people get uncomfortable. Their reaction can even become hate; hatred at feeling uncomfortable, hatred at being reminded of their fears, or perhaps hatred at a culture that so thoroughly disempowers so many people, that they don’t even have a clear idea of where to constructively direct their hatred.

People will often argue that certain things they disagree with are simply “wrong.” But if America has taught me one thing, it is that harmony and unity cannot be achieved through homogeneity and sameness but through diversity and difference. Your freedom to like vanilla, and my freedom to like—we’ll say chocolate—is the reason not only why Häagen-Dazs is in business but why Ben & Jerry’s can peacefully coexist next door.

And that’s why I have to come back to this question: Is this [contemporary Western] endemic sexualization of women, which supports a double-standard equally costly for men, any better than this [Iranian] coercive modesty?

And if not, is the solution more sexual censorship? Is the solution really more of someone else telling you what you should think, or say, or see, or do? Or will we overcome oppression through education, self-empowerment, and ultimately freedom of expression?

That’s what this panel is about, for me. Thank you for participating.

Watch the full video of the remainder of the panel.

I believe every inequality oppresses the oppressors as well as the oppressed because inequality erases opportunity and choice. As a man, I have privilege, but I’m also bound by strict social constraint. I’m not able to cuddle with acquaintances whether female, male, or intersex without being seen in a predatory light. I’m not able to express emotionality without fear of humiliation. And apparently, I learned painfully for the first time through this Femquake thing, some feminists believe I’m also not allowed to offer leadership in gender justice activism no matter how amorphous or self-empowering (as opposed to dogmatic) that leadership is intended to be.

Inequality is not the reality I want for humanity’s sons, nor its daughters, nor the rest of its children. That is why I call myself a feminist.

There are no truths without full and original context

Before I go any further, let me provide some background. On Sunday, April 25^th, I witnessed a surprising amount of debate over whether Boobquake was essentially anti-feminist, and I learned that Brainquake was organized to counter it. Unhappy with this dichotomization, I created another Facebook page and event called Femquake in the name of unity and self-empowerment:

Everyone should have the right to do as one pleases, from showing off cleavage to showing off intellect—or both! The real issue is not a woman’s body or her mind, but her humanity. Empower one another to live the lives we want, free of coercion.

What seemed pretty simple and straightforward at first quickly became more complicated when a blogger by the handle Feminist Mom attributed the creation of Femquake to Feministing.com and I left a comment to correct the misinformation. Then, an anonymous commenter on Feminist Mom’s blog expressed disappointment that I am a man, as they had been hoping Femquake was started by a woman. Now that they knew a man started the page, they said the sentiment I had expressed through creating Femquake “means…less” to them, despite still being a good one.

When I questioned why this might be the case, Feminist Mom offered this explanation, which I understand and disagree with:

When men step up as leaders for the women’s movement, it looks like we can’t even lead ourselves.

Anyway, consider reading the full comment thread on my post, as well as on this followup post by Feminist Mom questioning, “Men as feminist leaders?“. It’s Feminist Mom’s post and the anonymous commenter there that I’m responding to, below.

Ultimately, the conversation seems centered around two concepts: equality and leadership. To avoid any potential miscommunication or further conflations, I want to address both of them distinctly, and as succinctly as I can.

Leadership

Feminist Mom begins with a question:

What you said was, “for people to realize a desire to be independent, regardless of whether they are women or men, ‘following leaders’ is not the way to do it.” What is the way to do it then?

I thought I was pretty clear about my thoughts on leadership when I said this in an earlier comment:

All of us who started a “*quake” are leaders. But so are the many people who spread the word about the events. Jennifer McCreight could not possibly have done what she did without the leadership of her “followers”, which I count myself among.

What I am pointing to is the initiative of each person involved in collective action, such as the 160,000 people who wore “immodest” outfits on Boobquake, the several thousand who participated in Brainquake by showing off Iranian women’s intellectual achievements, and the several hundred who participated in Femquake by doing one, the other, or something else of their own choosing. In my view, many of these people could be considered leaders as well as followers. When I said that ‘following leaders’ is not the way to [achieve independence] after describing the ideal of self-empowerment that I tried to put forth in coining ‘femquake,’ what I meant was each individual can find independence through intentionality, but not through thoughtless action.

Independence is leadership of oneself, for oneself—but not necessarily by oneself. When someone has the freedom to choose their actions, they are no more followers than they are leaders. They may also be following the lead of one person while leading others themselves. To construe freely following a leader as being placed in a hierarchy in which there is no opportunity to move around is to misconstrue choice with force, and personal initiative with disempowerment.

So, the way to achieve independence is to acknowledge that you can both lead and follow at once, or you can do one or the other, and at your own volition. Otherwise, you are beholden to either your leaders or your followers. If you choose to follow a leader, do so with intent and without sacrificing skepticism. If you choose to lead, do so through example and without antipathy.

Equality

The Anonymous who I quoted in my last post left several more comments:

maymay is really misguided on how the infrastructure of feminism actually works. I can tell that simply by his disbelief in a feminism hierarchical…of course, I’m just reading off this page and hasn’t ventured into his blog yet. I imagine it’s a lot of RAH RAH YOU ROCK and I’m sorry that I can’t be the one, it’s a sweet effort and I appreciate that his heart is in the right place but nobody wants to hear from the white man on damn near anything to do with fucking equality, okay?

[…] get off my nuts b/c we’re talking about maymay here and not me.

Nobody wants to hear how a man lead us to unite our boobs and our brains and that is the long and short of it here. Men are NOT feminist leaders. They can be active participants in the movement, but they have to take a back seat in the charge and that’s just what it is. I’m sorry.

In regards to “how feminism actually works,” there is probably a lot of sociopolitical nuance that I have yet to learn. You are welcome to teach me, Anonymous, if you can do so without being mean to me. Otherwise, as should be elementarily obvious to you, I will simply refuse to listen.

Since you say you haven’t ventured into my blog yet, I can easily forgive your ignorance on the fact that I am a bisexual man. This instantly places me outside of the heterosexist viewpoint you seem to have already “imagine[d]” me in. Furthermore, I can forgive your ignorance on the fact that I am a sexually submissive man. Or that I am a Jewish man. Or that I am a non-monogomous man. Or that I am a man diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Or that I am a man without a high-school degree. Or that I am a man like many others who has faced any number of additional circumstances that would cost me certain privileges in one sense or another.

But should any of those things even matter in defining the value of Femquake? On the Femquake page, Ian Iverson said:

Part of gender equality is to not let gender be a basis for projecting motives onto others.

I think it does a severe disservice to any and all social justice causes to stand under a banner of equality and wave a flag of feminism while speaking assumptively about who someone else is due to either real or perceived privilege. I feel this is doubly true when one does this while admitting to indolence. It’s actions like the ones Anonymous demonstrates that retard the progress of gender justice because it alienates people who would otherwise easily identify themselves with feminist ideals.

I felt hurt—deeply hurt—that my gender would be the cause of a devaluation of the message of Femquake. I am left wondering: what role would Anonymous have men take as “active participants in the movement”? I, for one, do not advocate for equality so as to be told my place.

Later, Anonymous commented again and said this:

It annoyed me further to see that there is a wiki article about this now and the comments were all “I’m glad to see women discussing this, taking charge of this”.

YEAH, ABOUT THAT. The brainchild behind Femquake is a fucking man, so we don’t even have that glory hole, it’s his…and that’s why it means less to me.

As it should.

Feminism is about gender equality, and until we have gender equality, everyone of all genders will continue to pay a horrifically painful cost one way or another. In feeling that Femquake somehow belongs to men because a man started the page, Anonymous is playing a simplistic (and very sad) zero-sum game where the actions taken by people of one gender necessarily invalidates the value of another.

That is an old, ugly game that can never lead to equality. Feminists ought never to play it.

And that’s all I have to say to or about Anonymous.