Just like last year, I was bowled over by the conference organizers’ hospitality. Just like last year, the conference brought together some of the brightest and most passionate people to discuss polyamory and its relationships with other social communities, political and interpersonal ideas, and, of course itself. Just like last year, I’m having a great time on far too little sleep.

I’m extremely grateful to have had the privilege of helping set the tone for this years’ event as the Opening Keynote Speaker. I wanted to do the conference attendees, as well as the people who were not able or willing to participate in the conference, justice. To that end, my keynote was intentionally confrontational; I even (metaphorically) burned the conference’s logo (in my slides).

My keynote was an act—part seminar, part performance—I hoped would shine a white-hot light onto a topic too often left unexplored and under-valued at polyamory conferences, meetups, and other events I’ve been to. It’s a topic I’ve come face-to-face with in a painful way, thanks to my sudden awareness of how it’s been impairing my ability to have “polyamorous relationships.” And it’s a topic I knew would ruffle some feathers.

The immediate feedback I got from Billy Holder, APW2012′s General Operations Director, was unsurprising: “There were…mixed emotions….” That’s good. That’s useful. That’s the point.

I commend Billy and his crew not merely for putting together a conference, but for putting together a conference that welcomed and encouraged disagreement, confrontation, and curiosity. There are things I think they did badly, but I think most of these were caused by the structural issues I addressed in my talk, not from a place of intentional malice. Most of all, I think they did the most important thing extraordinarily well: they prevented their idea of perfection from becoming the enemy of good. And if that were the only thing they did well, and it sure isn’t, I think Atlanta Poly Weekend 2012 is offering an invaluable thing to all communities.

If this trend holds, I have no doubt next year’s Atlanta Poly Weekend conference will be invaluable, too.

And now, without further ado, following is a transcript of my Atlanta Poly Weekend 2012 Opening Keynote address. After I find some time to prepare them, I’ll also publish my slides, along with a video for you to download. Like all my similar work, this presentation is “open source” and Creative Commons licensed. Should you feel so moved, downloading it, using it yourself (including, since I can only be at one place at one time, literally re-presenting it wherever you wish and are able), redistributing it, or sharing it with anyone you think might find it valuable is encouraged. If you do any of these things, I would greatly appreciate it if you would link back to this page. :)

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My name is maymay. When I was a teenager, I ingested a poison that gave me an incredible power. The poison was a gift that, today, lets me perceive things many others cannot—and it was a gift that turned me into a monster. This is my story. This is how I learned about relationships.

Did you see the frightened ones?
Did you hear the falling bombs?
Did you ever wonder
why we had to run for shelter
when the promise of a brave new world
unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?

Oooooooo ooo ooooo oooh….

Did you see the frightened ones?
Did you hear the falling bombs?
The flames are all long gone,
but the pain lingers on.
Goodbye blue sky.
Goodbye blue sky.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.

My power is a gift; we all have one. I am grateful to have been invited to stand in front of you today to share this gift, this superpower. It’s what lets me create awesome, beautiful things. It’s what empowers me to empower others. And, at the same time, it’s what enables me to hurt people. People like you.

My power does not feel good. It is not light, or happy, or pleasurable, or comfortable. It is not nice, or loving, or fluffy, or soothing. But it is intimate, and when I use it, it will suddenly create a relationship between us that is strong, resilient, and unignorable.

If at any time during this session you feel you no longer want to be in this space with me, then remember that you are already empowered to leave. I won’t be insulted. I want you to prioritize yourself above all other people, because I want you to understand why putting yourself first is the key to putting me—and every other person participating in this conference, if not this amazing experience we call life—first, too.

I know that can sound, to many, as though it’s paradoxical. How can putting yourself first actually be putting me first, too? I’m about to show you. But, to see it, you have to be willing to feel uncomfortable with me.

Are you ready?

“Polyamory” doesn’t empower “Relationship Choice”

1. See Abe.
2. See Belle.
3. See Abe and Belle fuck.
4. See Claire.
5. See Claire and Abe fuck.
6. See Belle and Claire fight.
7. See Belle and Abe fight.
8. See Claire and Abe fight.
9. See Abe’s and Belle’s flight.

What happened here?

On page 61 of her book, What Does Polyamory Look Like?: Polydiverse Patterns of Loving and Living in Modern Polyamorous Relationships, polyamory educator Mim Chapman, Ph.D. describes this situation with a dramatization that will no doubt sound familiar to many of you:

Unwary couples can make a wrong turn on their way to forming an inclusive Poly-L Triad, and end up in a non-inclusive, Non-Triadic “V” by mistake. Two primary partners may have decided to open up their relationship, with the goal of forming an inclusive Triad[…].They commit to collaboration and egalitarian decision-making in choosing their new partner(s). Then one primary partner “jumps the gun” and does the old, “I see her, I want her, I take her, I commit to her.” After a few months, he brings her home to his primary, assuming the existing partner will immediately adore hot new love object and Poof, they’ll be a big, happy, inclusive Poly-L Triad.

Once in a while this actually works, but more often the response from the existing primary partner is something akin to “So what am I, chopped liver? Which head were you thinking with, and how did you manage to forget our commitment to egalitarian decisions about who we bring into our lives? What made you forget that we committed to working together openly in building family, and to collaborating in choosing people we both genuinely enjoy, who enhance both of our lives while we enhance theirs? We agreed that we’d work together in the initial process of getting to know a potential new partner and finding out whether or not there is an interest in joining both of us to form the Loving Poly-L Triad we long to create together. But you leapt over the fence on your own, buddy! You picked her, she’s yours, and you and she can pack up and move on down the pike, or at least carry your relationship elsewhere.”

I’m making this a bit more dramatic than it often ends up being, just to remind you that waiting a few more hours or days can be a good idea, in order to discuss the potential love with your primary partner.

While her intentions are clearly golden, Mim missed a critical concept, a concept so central it’s even encoded in polyamory advocates’ language: “relationship choice.” Can you sense what’s missing?

Let’s replay the situation, in “slow motion,” one frame at a time.

1. Here’s Abe again. Now, Abe is a man. He’s a single individual. He’s represented as a single dot.
2. Here, we have Belle. Now, Belle is a woman. She’s also a single individual, so she’s also represented as a single dot.
3. When Abe and Belle meet, and possibly also when they “fuck,” a relationship is created between Abe and Belle. That relationship is represented as a line between the dots. This creates a structure called a “couple” or, more precisely, a dyad.
4. Since Abe and Belle’s relationship exists before anyone else enters into the picture, we often also call them “primary partners.” Let’s call Abe “Primary 1” and Belle “Primary 2.”
5. Next, here’s Claire. Claire is a woman, like Belle, and as such is also a single individual, like both Belle and Abe. Therefore, she’s represented as a dot.
6. When Claire and Abe meet and, again, possibly also “fuck,” a new relationship is created between them. This, too, is represented as a line.
7. Since Abe already has a “primary” relationship with Belle, Claire is a “secondary,” and specifically Abe’s “secondary.” We’ll call her “A-Secondary 1.”

This is the critical junction. This structural shape, as you may know, is called a “Vee.” Although the prototypical terms are words like “primary” and “secondary,” they are authoritarian, not structural. Therefore, in this vee, Abe is what I’ll call the apex—the highest level of hierarchy—while Belle and Claire are both terminals. When this happens, Belle and Claire are in a relationship, but neither they, nor Abe, know it yet.

This is the point when, in Mim’s dramatization, “one primary partner ‘jumps the gun’ and does the old, ‘I see her, I want her, I take her, I commit to her.’” In fact, the instant Claire met Abe, a relationship between Claire and Belle is created, regardless of whether Abe and Claire have been sexual with one another. In polyamory’s jargon, the word for this relationship is “metamour.”

For those unfamiliar with the jargon, allow me a brief digression to expound on polyamory’s language.

Polyamory’s Fetish for Neologisms

The term “metamour” is a neologism, which itself, “is a newly coined term, word, or phrase, that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language.” It’s a combination of two words. “Metamour”’s prefix, “meta,” is derived from the Greek “μετά” meaning “self” and, in English, means “about (itself)”. Its root is “amour,” meaning “love.” In a polyamorous context, “metamour” therefore means “love about love.” The term is an abstraction from the mainstream’s “paramour.”

According to most English dictionaries, “paramour” is defined as…

(noun) A lover, especially the illicit partner of a married person.

…while these terms’ shared root, “amour,” is defined as:

(noun) A secret or illicit love affair or lover.

I love how polyamory appropriates terms about intimacy that, in mainstream use, carry a negative connotation and reframes them in a positive light. Here’s how the Polyamorous Lexicon redefines “paramour”:

PARAMOUR: (literally, par way + amor love; by way of love) 1. A married person’s outside lover. 2. A mistress—the unmarried female lover of a married man. 3. A nonmarried member of a polyamorous relationship.

Unlike mainstream language, which focuses almost exclusively on idealized sex acts, polyamorous language is filled with terms that describe the structure of nodes in relation to each other. For example:

• This is a “couple,” but can also be called a dyad.
• This is a “threesome,” but can also be called a triad.
• This is a “foursome,” but can also be called a quad.

As we add more dots to the graph, polyamory’s terminology becomes more ambiguous:

• This is an “intimate network.”

If we examine polyamorous terms closely, however, we’ll sense an obvious deficiency: it focuses almost exclusively on the nodes, the dots in the graph and their structural position in relation to one another, but does not describe the intimate interaction itself. Polyamory does not describe the lines between the dots with any significant granularity.

Ironically, this deficiency is obscured by the way polyamorous people discuss polyamory, themselves.

How Polyamory’s Institutions Undermine Relationship Choice

If we succumb to contemporary polyamory rhetoric, in which “metamour” carries all kinds of behavioral connotations and poly-cultural scripts, Belle and Claire are now coerced to relate to each other “as metamours,” without ever consenting to have this kind of relationship. Neither of them were given a choice, asked for input, or even considered by the others. They couldn’t have been, because they don’t yet even know the other exists.

This coercion is subtle, and often justified by polyamory’s proponents as “a good idea.” It’s an oppressive behavior borne from the desire to be more loving, not less. I know this because I am guilty of hurting some of the people in my life in this way—and, very likely, so are you.

This systemic oppression has a name, dyadism, and it’s perpetrated in subtle and not-so-subtle ways by people with couple privilege. Sadly it’s a privilege most strongly denied by polyamorous people who have it. For the purposes of this talk, I’ll borrow heavily from John Bell’s work on adultism and define dyadism (and couple privilege) as:

behaviors & attitudes that presume people in a dyad are more important than others and entitled to act upon them without their consent.

In many of our experiences, the people with whom we have pre-existing relationships still claim certain “dibs” on us, and we claim certain “dibs” back, on them. In one way or another, especially in romantic entanglements, most of us are subtly told what to feel, told what to do, and told what to want. Even if a new person is welcomed into an existing relationship structure as an “equal,” it’s common to assume the pre-existing dyad’s relationship agreements are automatically enforceable on the new person, unless and until they are re-negotiated. However, for the most part, the polyamorous world considers this treatment of people acceptable because we were treated in much the same way and internalized the idea that “that’s the way you have relationships.”

The essence of couple privilege is disrespect of individuals and individuals’ agency. Consider how the following statements are essentially disrespectful. What are the assumptions behind each of them? Do you remember having heard any of these when you were developing your polyamorous relationships?

• “You’ll really like your metamour.”
• “Before you get involved with someone else, you need to check in with me.”
• “You need to get along with my other lovers.”
• “You need to meet all the people I’m involved with.”
• “What do you know? You haven’t met her!”
• “We have an agreement that we only date as a couple.”

What most polyamorous people misunderstand is that the “metamour” structure in no way describes how Abe feels towards either Belle or Claire, or vice versa. That’s so important it deserves being repeated: a metamoric relationship is a structure. It is not a form of intimacy, or closeness, or even a kind of “togetherness.”

The lines on these graphs are not about sex, or even love. What’s depicted in graphs like these is not (necessarily) an attempt by one person or another to behave lovingly or hatefully towards anyone else; interacting with other people is simply what happens in the course of life for a social species, like us. Once a relationship—of any kind—is established between any two given nodes in a social network, adding a third node automatically positions one an apex and the other two, terminals.

This same diagram, often used to describe sexual, romantic, or life-partner relationships, could just as accurately describe strong friendship, co-worker, familial and other kinds of social ties. In that case, instead of the lines representing so-called “intimate” relationships, they could represent a slew of other types. Perhaps Abe employs both Belle and Claire and, since Claire was hired after Belle, Abe trusts Belle’s work more than Claire’s. In such a situation, it is still accurate to describe Claire and Belle as structurally, if not romantically, equivalent to what polyamorous jargon calls “metamours.”

Such “metamoric relationships” abound. They’re not limited to (sexual, romantic) polyamorous relationships. As a social movement, polyamory shines at articulating this deep understanding of conceptual structure—that is, the structure of ideas. The core of that is the metamoric relationship.

Metamoric relationships are so common, in fact, that the polyamory community is ethically obligated to relinquish its monopoly over them. Currently, the term is exclusively used to describe the identical positionality of two terminals to an apex of a person’s sexual or romantic relationship. But if we, as polyamory activist Angi eloquently said, want to “live in a world where we are free to choose whatever relationship structure suits us the best, without being made to feel that we are some kind of freaks or degenerates,” then we must make it okay to describe our co-workers, our siblings, and everyone else with whom we share a mutual relationship, as “metamours.”

For instance, in the relationship involving Mish, my Work, and I, Mish and I are metamours. My Work is the apex, while Mish and I are terminals. The same is true if you replace me with Rebecca, or Alisa; in that case, Mish and Rebecca or Alisa are metamours in relation to my Work. The reason is obvious: they all have an influence on my Work. In much the same way, you—yes, you—and I are also metamours in relation to my Work because I created this presentation and you’re consuming it.

If we actually understood “metamour” like this, we could avoid the pitfall of privileging sexual or romantic relationships over any others, we could stop excluding asexual-identified people, and we could treat our relationships or commitments to our jobs, friends, and natural environment with the same level of importance we place on our sexual partners. Of course, you wouldn’t have to treat all these relationships as being of equal importance to you, but at least then you would be one step closer to making a self-empowered choice to place whatever degree of importance you want on whatever relationships you have, rather than be bound by pre-imposed cultural scripts that decree “sexual relationships are the most important.”

If our goal is truly “equality in relationship choice,” we must stop privileging sexual(-romantic) relationships over others, or we will continue to undermine ourselves.

Whenever we use a label to describe one of our relationships, be it “wife,” “boyfriend,” “partner,” or, yes, even “metamour” we put ourselves into a box from which we must struggle to escape. That’s why, throughout this talk, I’ve been using the word “relationship” liberally. In asexuality activist David Jay’s words:

Describe a relationship as a “friendship” and people will make a set of assumptions about how important that relationship is in your life, how you feel about the person and what sort of commitments you’ve made to one another, describe it as “romantic” and you’ll get another set of assumptions [but] most of the time neither set of assumptions is very accurate.

[…]

I use relationship in the broadest possible way, the dictionary definition of “a connection, association, or involvement.” I have a relationship with my computer, the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in my glass of water have a relationship, so does a nine year old and her multiplication tables. “Relationship” describes the full spectrum from friendship to romance and then some, it gives people almost no room to project false assumptions about what kind of relationship you’re talking about, which is what you want.

Rather than relate to the idea of metamours as the generically useful concept that it is, the polyamory movement has institutionalized it to the point of self-sabotage. This is a dire mistake.

Making the mistake of institutionalizing “metamour” is part of what makes “polyamory” a failure in others’ eyes—and they’re correct to believe so. This mistake is part of what neutralizes polyamory’s ability to ground itself in its superpower. This mistake is a poison inside polyamorous communities.

Making the mistake of institutionalizing “metamour” is one way we, as polyamorous people, are still being controlled by The System (of kyriarchical oppression). Making this mistake is one way we, as polyamorous people, create communities that abuse other people. Making this mistake is one way we, as polyamorous people, are abused by the very communities we created.

Often, I hear polyamorous people decry opponents like social conservatives, polygamists, sexist unicorn hunters, and entitled, homophobic men. None of these things can stop polyamory’s superpower, because what polyamory has to offer the world is a superpower. But before we can understand our greatest power, we have to understand our greatest vulnerability.

Polyamory’s kryptonite—the one thing from our own world that can kill us—is not conservative activists. It’s not the one-penis policy, although that’s some seriously sexist, homophobic bullshit right there. It’s not even the institution of coupled marriage. Polyamory’s kryptonite is the institution of metamours.

When we think we need to behave “as metamours”—however we were told metamours should behave towards one another—instead of simply as we choose to relate to other people in our lives, we’re no different than monogamous people trapped in heteronormative gender roles, traditional marriages, or worse. Relationship labels, such as “husband” or “wife,” along with the institutions they reference, such as “marriage,” destroy one’s freedom of relationship choice by coercing us to relate to the institution rather than the person.

Instead of having an actual, unique relationship with the person they married, most married men relate to their wife by “being a husband.” Similarly, instead of having an actual, unique relationship with certain people in their “intimate networks,” most polyamorous people relate to one of these people by “being a metamour.”

These are fundamentally dehumanizing, frighteningly pervasive, and totally invisible patterns of behavior. That is, we do not even know we’re carrying them out. To understand why, it’s important to clarify the way we communicate about communication itself.

Communicating about Communication

Language is a superpower. It turns the impossible into the possible. Without the ability to describe an idea, that idea does not exist. At least, not for those who lack the power, or the language, to perceive it.

But the impetus, the force of that idea, does exist. Invisibly, it affects any entity sensitive enough to perceive what it knows it does not yet know. The impetus calls on that entity—be it you, me, or something else entirely—in an as-yet-indescribable way to realize the idea. It pulls that entity toward feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. There is no English word to adequately describe the inexplicable total consumption such an influence has. Therefore, I simply call it “the Work.”

To under-sensitive others, the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of their comrades are themselves inexplicable, as such behaviors are artifacts the Work manifested. However, to these under-sensitive others, such inexplicable behavior is frightening precisely because they don’t know its source; when something is invisible, one simply doesn’t register its presence, so there’s no reason either to fear nor explore it.

However, when we are confronted with behavior we do not understand, what was once invisible becomes visible—and unexplainable. Reactions to this experience are so common we have a word to describe those who confront us in ways we do not understand: we say they are “crazy.” We create a divisive binary: we are sane, they are insane.

Creating divisive binaries is a pattern of behavior that exists at every scale of human interaction, from the individual, to the societal. In his review of James C. Scott’s 1998 book, Seeing like a State: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed, Venkatesh Rao succinctly describes this behavior as “the rationalization of the fear of (apparent) chaos.” He outlines a recipe that explains why “a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring” in almost all areas of human experience:

1. Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
2. Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
3. Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
4. Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
5. Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
6. Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
7. Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility.

This is the central driving force of injustice and oppression: through our desire to make legible that which we cannot read, coupled with a fear of our own limitations made visible to us by a confrontation with that which we do not understand, we unwittingly perpetrate extraordinarily brutal levels of non-consensual violence, even and especially when we think we are doing good.

All oppressions use the following, invariable pattern: obscure, divide, conquer, and homogenize. That pattern is oppression; that is the DNA of evil itself. Evil cannot be conquered, for any attempt to resist evil using conquest empowers it anew.

The cunning of that ploy is why we must learn to recognize the super-powers encoded in our many languages. We must internalize an ability to be strengthened by our weaknesses, and be curious about our fears. To do that, we must first learn how to see what’s invisible, and how to read what’s illegible.

Fractal boundaries: Disruption and resistance are sensors

How can we see invisible things?

Imagine a river. At the bottom of the river are rocks and other sediments, arranged on the riverbed in a certain pattern. This pattern creates a specific texture, a roughness that gives the riverbed its shape. At the top of the river is the water, also flowing in a certain pattern, with a dynamic texture.

The texture at the top of the water is directly influenced by the texture of the riverbed. If you throw a rock into the river, it’s obvious you’ll forever change the texture of the riverbed, but you will also forever change the texture of the water atop the rock you threw. The implications are thus obvious but one of them is often overlooked: if you want to know the texture of the riverbed, you could examine the riverbed itself, but you could also examine the texture of the water.

This relationship is called a fractal: the rock on the riverbed and the water atop the river’s flow have a relationship that is invariable at every level of scale. Identifying invariability is the key to perceiving patterns. The way to identify a fractal boundary is to violently disrupt it such as, in this example, throwing a stone into a river.

That’s why people throw stones into rivers: to create ripples—to effect change. But, sometimes, you don’t need to cause the disruption yourself. Sometimes you simply need to look for artifacts of resistance.

Imagine a mountainside. On the mountainside are trees, again, arranged on the Earth in a certain pattern. Between the trees is air, constantly moving, constantly invisible. You can’t see it, you usually can’t feel it, and even rarer can you hear it. But when the wind picks up, the trees start to move, rustling loudly. They are resisting the air, making what was once literally invisible visible, what was once perhaps inaudible, audible.

This friction, this resistance, this physical confrontation between the trees and the wind is violent. When the violence exceeds a certain level of scale, the wind becomes a storm. Take it one level of scale further, and the storm becomes a “natural disaster.” A soft breeze hitting a single tree is not conceptualized as “damaging,” but a tornado can uproot trees, destroy entire forested areas, and kill people.

Recently, I hiked a hillside in the Colorado mountains. It was cold, and very windy. The wind’s howling swept the voices of my hiking partner and I away from one another’s ears—it literally impeded the vibrations in the air that our speech projected towards each other. My hiking partner said, “I want to talk to you but it’s so noisy! I want to find a quiet place where we can sit and chat!”

“Don’t worry,” I called back. She looked puzzled for a moment, so I explained, “We have everything we need to make ourselves a quiet place right here on the mountain!” Again, she looked puzzled. “Listen to the wind! All we have to do is move around the mountainside, or wait until the wind changes direction, and it will be far quieter; the Earth is a technology we can use to make our environment quiet.” She smiled, and we hiked on.

I believe this holds true in every conceptual domain, from science, art, to all coherent organization of human experience. In each case, the fractal boundary exposes the invariability of the pattern. Humans perceived atoms for the first time by rupturing molecules at their bonds; we detected black holes and neutron stars by observing their gravitational forces on other objects nearby.

Boundaries are the keys to unlocking knowledge: they are the point at which invisible things must change in some way. That moment of change—that moment when the thing that was is disrupted and thus transformed into the thing it is about to be—creates artifacts we can use to sense the existence of things we didn’t even know that we were not aware of. That is, if and only if we acquire the appropriate skills, the appropriate conceptual and somatic sensors.

If you want to cause the most pain when you bite someone’s neck, find the boundary between their carotid artery and the neighboring tendon. Once you find that point, press your fingers there. You can use the boundary to gauge your position, isolate your target—either the artery or the tendon—then, bite.

[BEGIN Audience participation:

With this knowledge at hand, let’s practice disrupting the fractal boundaries all around us in social space here, now.

END Audience participation.]

“Resistance is Futile”—Polyamory is being assimilated by The System

[BEGIN Audience participation:

• SAY:
  • “Everyone raise their hands. Now, keep your hand up if you’re currently a secondary or filling a role like a secondary to some other partner. Okay, now keep your hand up if, throughout your entire relationship history, you have mostly been a secondary or filling a role like a secondary. Okay, finally, keep your hand up if, throughout your entire relationship history, you have only been a secondary or filled a role like a secondary—if you have never had anything resembling a primary relationship, regardless of how ‘casual’ or ‘serious’ that relationship was, and regardless of how long that relationship lasted?”
• IF VERY FEW HANDS ARE UP, say:
  • “Look around you. Look how few hands are still up. These are people I’ll call ‘OMS’s,’ or ‘Only-or-Mostly-Secondaries.’ Why do you think so few ‘OMS’ are here?”
• ELSE, say:
  • “Now, how many of you are speakers, presenters, or staff members with decision-making power at this event?”

END Audience participation]

Within the polyamorous world, arguably the most marginalized group of people are those called, or treated like, “only-or-mostly-secondaries,” or “OMS.”

People in marginalized groups do not show up at conferences organized by people with the privilege they, themselves, lack. People in marginalized groups do not identify with the language created by people with the privilege they, themselves, lack. Only-or-mostly-secondaries are behaving polyamorously but, due to the oppression they face in the social structures developed by this community, such as this conference, they do not identify as polyamorous; what use have they for “Atlanta Poly Weekend”?

What does it mean to be “secondary”? It means to be non-primary. It means to be considered less important than others. Some ways to think about this are:

• Secondary is to person of color as primary is to white, since to be a person of color means to be not-white.
• Secondary is to female as primary is to male, since to be female means to be not-male.
• Secondary is to gay as primary is to straight, since to be straight means to be not-gay.
• Secondary is to insane as primary is to sane, since to be sane means to be not-crazy.

Only-or-mostly-secondaries have been excluded by the supposedly inclusive structures of “the polyamorous community.” There are so few, if any, people who are only-or-mostly-secondaries in their relationships at this conference because their experience of polyamorous structures is one in which the structure itself has abused them. Only-secondaries do not want to surround themselves by people who are often not even aware such a thing as painful to them as “couple privilege” exists.

Recall again the DNA of evil itself, the pattern of oppression at work:

1. obscure,
2. divide,
3. conquer,
4. homogenize.

This pattern maps perfectly onto the oppressive systemic behavior at the scale of our society at large in relation to the poly community:

1. Obscure the validity and possibility of polyamorous relationship structures by enforcing monogamy.
2. Divide people into groups, such as married and unmarried,
3. Conquer the oppressed (unmarried) group by making marriage a symbol of success and status,
4. Homogenize the dominant group by institutionalizing the structure of marriage into law and other societal standards.

Sadly, this pattern also maps perfectly onto the oppressive systemic behavior at the scale of the poly community in relation to secondaries.

1. Obscure the subtleties of couple privilege,
2. divide people into groups, such as “polyamorous” and “monogamous,” or “primaries” and “secondaries,”
3. conquer the marginalized group by excluding them from decision-making processes,
4. homogenize the dominant group into institutional structures, such as an “inclusive Poly-L Triad.”

In her 2006 book, Transformations: Women, Gender, and Psychology, Mary Crawford wrote:

Many of us are multiply privileged and multiply oppressed. They don’t counterbalance each other.

As polyamorous people, we have endured the epistemic abuse of living in a world constantly telling us that we are, in Angi’s words, “freaks or degenerates.” Many of us have been forced to repress parts of ourselves, to lie about the relationships we have, to keep them hidden from parents, employers, and sometimes even spouses.

We want to believe we know right from wrong, good from evil. But, do we?

The elephant in the room at poly conferences, meetups, and communities is the centering of a couple’s experience. That is absurd! That ought to infuriate us! For fuck’s sake, it’s a “POLY” event!

The System is ingenious, pernicious, and it is inside of us because we are a part of it. And it is because we are a part of it that we’ve been unable to perceive the possibilities of what lies beyond. Like a Dark Wizard’s Horcrux, The System has placed pieces of its soul into each and every one of us, using us, collectively, to recreate itself time and again in new and different manifestations, ad infinitum.

If we, as polyamorous people, truly want to empower others, we must recognize this internalized dominance for what it is, and end it.

To do that, we must get even closer to our kryptonite than we are now. Just as antidotes to snake bites are made from snake venom, we must now ingest some poison, because we are all already suffering. We have all already been poisoned by The System.

I pray I’ll be able to use my gift to empower you to survive what we’re about to do. I need you to take some poison with me now.

Repulsive Intimacy: Violence is not the opposite of intimacy

When I was a teenager, I ingested a poison that gave me an incredible power.

The poison I ingested was membership in the BDSM Scene, a social microcosm of deliberate erotic megalomania. The BDSM Scene is a sexuality subculture that bears some resemblance in structure, but not purpose, to the polyamory community: both are social systems; both are comprised of many people who are multiply privileged and multiply oppressed; both are ignorant of their own respective privileges, their superpowers, and their kryptonites.

Unlike the polyamory community, the BDSM Scene is an institution entirely devoted to the fetishization of oppression culture. Unlike the polyamory community, the BDSM Scene is a poison that is unrepentantly evil; its sole purpose is the eroticization of epistemic violence. Unlike the polyamory community, there is nothing redeemable about the BDSM Scene; its sole value is as a structure to be wholly and unapologetically resisted.

The power I derived from this poison is the ability to understand the distinction between something’s individual instance and the structural manifestation of that same thing. In the case of BDSM, understanding both the fact that there is a distinction between people’s BDSM activity and the culture of the BDSM Scene, as well as the fact that there is a relationship between people’s BDSM activity and the culture of the BDSM Scene, is key to understanding why the BDSM Scene-State is an unrepentant evil. Specifically, BDSM’s individualistic manifestation (like, “kinky, consensual sex”) gives people control over their engagement with violence, while its systemic manifestation reproduces The System’s epistemic violence without giving people an ability to consent to it. In other words:

While you can “safeword” during a scene, you can’t safeword The Scene. Just as rape culture is the institutionalization of (systemic) sexism, the BDSM Scene is the institutionalization of the practice of fetishizing oppression culture; it is, to use [hacker theorist] McKenzie Wark’s phrasing, an abstraction—a double of a double.

My gift is the power to see failure, violence, and domination. What I see most often is epistemic pain and abuse. This power lets me perceive relationships between things that exist at different levels of scale; I have a kind of social-systemic x-ray vision.

Recently, I had the privilege of participating in KinkForAll Denver, an open-to-the-public “unconference” whose theme is sex and relationships education. In 2009, I co-founded KinkForAll with a long-term goal of developing “self-empowerment training areas” where people could choose to endure the intense challenge of putting themselves in an uncomfortable but not dangerous situation. KinkForAll is designed to encourage us to learn how to “move up” and claim our personal autonomy, our agency, and our power when we need to, and learn how to “move back” to respect others who share this home we call Earth.

KinkForAll is not designed to succeed, but rather to fail inexpensively. It is not designed as a safe space, but rather public space. It is not only designed to encourage us to “move up and move back,” but also to learn to say to and hear from one another, “How about you? Okay then, fuck off!”

I Work on KinkForAll because much of the world we live in is uncomfortable with and hostile toward education about intimacy. This enforced ignorance betrays itself through sexual stigmas that sustain an aristocratic stranglehold on information, privileging credentialed gatekeepers over the only true expert on your own desires: you! The fact is, we don’t know a lot about intimacy, its diverse formulations, or the interplay and distinctions between the many kinds that exist.

Just as sexual relationships are privileged over asexual ones, “lovey-dovey” relationships are privileged over (antagonistic) confrontational ones. Valid forms of “intimacy” are therefore only understood as the former, not the latter. Thankfully, BDSM complicates this inaccurate conflation of “intimacy” with “love.”

On page 174 of “Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy,” ethnographer Staci Newmahr writes:

The challenges in understanding intimacy parallel the problems in conceptualizing violence, pain, and eroticism. Trapped in moral frameworks and tethered to political agendas, these ideas are rarely deconstructed. SM forces us to confront the apparent inconsistencies and paradoxes contained within them. In doing so, we can trace conceptual links between intimacy, eroticism, and violence that move beyond psychological models of innate drives and pathologies.

In other words BDSM is unequivocally about violence, though trapped in contemporary moral frameworks, few BDSM’ers will admit to this. Newmahr continues:

Nonconsensual violence (what most people mean when they say “real violence”) transgresses physical, social, emotional, and ethical boundaries between actors. […] To violate, and to be violated, are intimate experiences. If we cease to reserve the word “intimate” for situations that are desirable or healthy, we can see, for example, the intimacy of violent crime. Rape, which many of us would shudder to consider “intimacy,” is so heinous precisely because it is so intimate.

Since rape is an abhorrent (violent) crime, and since the anti-SM feminist viewpoint has so thoroughly monopolized discourse regarding social values in all their myriad applications, accepting “violence” as being a potential part of “sex,” much less a potentially desirable and valuable facet of some consensual sexual activity, is believed even in pro-BDSM circles simply to be unconscionable. It is rejected out of hand, uncritically, without nary a shred of self-reflection; we who tout ourselves non-judgmental cowardly judge that which we value.

This is the point at which we can rupture BDSM itself. Such knee-jerk denialism, this self-defensive behavior, is evidence of a fractal boundary. This is the point at which we can violently disrupt things in order to see distinctions and observe relationships through multiple levels of scale.

In her works, Newmahr conceptualizes intimacy as “the experience of achieving access to protected aspects of others’ selves.” The value in Newmahr’s work is, in part, her emphasis on the violent disruption of morally-driven epistemic bondage. Those moral Systems are conceptual restraints shaming us for desiring experiences—rape fantasies, painful sensations like cutting or whipping, being physically bound—that are uncomfortable, but not dangerous. The System knows that if we felt free to choose discomfort as comfort, to choose pain as pleasure, to choose bondage as freedom, we could learn to use an instrument of liberation it must render obscure to survive: submission, and its powers.

In fact, a typical relationship with violence mirrors Abe and Belle’s “wrong turn on their way to forming an inclusive Poly-L Triad,” to borrow Mim’s words again. It’s the same reason why BDSM Scene’sters make the dire mistake of creating a divisive “kinky” and “vanilla” binary. Look at the process of thinking, one frame at a time:

1. Here’s Abe again.
2. Now, instead of Belle, we’ll use B to mean “BDSM,” a contextualized expression of violence.
3. As Abe develops an understanding of BDSM and a desire to explore it, a relationship is created between him and the conception of violence. Again, this relationship is represented as a line between the dots, and the structure is identical to what we’ve seen before: it’s a dyad.
4. Here’s Candy.
5. When Candy and Abe meet and start playing with BDSM together, a new relationship is created between them.

What happens next depends on their relationship to violence. If we succumb to The System’s morally-driven, epistemic bondage, there are only two possibilities:

• The less common situation is that Abe and Candy feel content in their relationship together and in their BDSM play, in which case they consider themselves “kinky” and each develop relationships to violence “as metamours” using an institution known as The BDSM Scene.
• More likely, however, Abe and Candy are disturbed by their desire to “do SM” play, or are repulsed by the only visible patterns of behavior for it, in which case they distance themselves from their relationship to violence, maintaining an ideological distance from anything “kinky,” and falling back into (the illusion of) a dyadic structure.

To continue replicating itself into the behavioral patterns of our people’s future generations, The System needs us to believe that there are exactly two options. Not one, not three, but two. Either:

• “resistance is futile”; this breeds apathy. To BDSM’ers, this laziness manifests in self-deceptions like “BDSM cannot be violence.”

Or:

• “resistance is conquest”; this breeds dominance. To BDSM’ers, this seems legible, and so they create social institutions—the BDSM Scene-State—for the explicit purpose of reproducing this very trait.

Some of us decide to adopt the former mindset, while others decide to adopt the latter. Either way, in so doing, The System has gotten us, at the scale of cliques, Scenes, and whole societies, to divide ourselves into binary groupings: the oppressed, and the privileged. As a result, one group believes “the other” is “irrational” precisely because the division itself is artificial!

Again, when we are confronted by a confusing reality that we do not understand, we too often succumb to the temptation of legibility. We “use authoritarian power to impose” our vision onto others. We repeat this same cycle of non-consensual domination. As I said during my seminar at Atlanta Poly Weekend 2011:

This is what in-group/out-group, us/them, you-versus-me, thinking looks like. This is how privilege hierarchies are created and recreated time and again.

Recall again the pattern of oppression, the DNA of evil itself: obscure, divide, conquer, homogenize. We are trapped in an omnipresent cycle of non-consensual violence, one so pervasive that there is no English word to describe the inexplicable total consumption such an influence has. Therefore, I simply call it “The Satisfaction.”

I beg each and every one of you listening to me speak—whether you’re listening to me in person today, or whether you’re watching a recording of me a day from now, a year from now, or a decade from now—I beg you, please, never let yourself succumb to The Satisfaction’s comfort, or pleasure, for these are lies, illusions conjured by The System, and they aim to forever impair your power.

We are almost there. We can now see The System and the parasitic hold it has on us from within our safest spaces. We must now learn how to sterilize, and overcome it.

What The System obscures is choice. The decision it offers us, futility or conquest, is not just a false dichotomy, although it is that, too. Regardless of the decision we make, if we succumb to its framing, its way of being, it will have gotten us to destroy the very essence of self-empowered choice.

This is the part you’ve been waiting for. This is where I’ll bite you on the neck where it hurts the most. This is when you claim your superpowers.

How to Choose Love: Inventing Our Powers

My knowledge of my power is derived, in large part, from my experiences in the BDSM Scene. To survive there,

I ruptured and reconstituted myself an intellisexual cyborg who thrived on the orgiastic exchange of conceptions rather than bodily fluids, a kind of idea-sex in which hyperlinks are sex toys. (Probably strap-ons.)

[…I]t is also no accident that I am a brutal critic of the BDSM Scene at this moment in history, nor that I would critique it using the lore of radical transparency, diversity, and accessibility—all gleaned from techno-privileged open sources. For all intents and purposes, I am the illegitimate offspring of The Scene and The State at a time when the literary telepathic non-magic of the Internet threatens them both.

“Sexual reproduction,” as socialist-feminist academic Donna Haraway wrote, “is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function of the system environment.” You see, you and I are being intimate in a way we may never have been before. I can see our ideas having sex with each other right now, right here, in the spaces between our bodies.

I am not just a man, nor just a submissive, nor just a human, nor just a Jew, nor just a person with bipolar disorder. Yes, I am all of those things. But I am also a blasphemous, illegitimate fusion of all these things mutated to the power of their number.

I have been unapologetically disloyal to my ancestors. Still borrowing from Haraway, “illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.”

So, too, must you be unfaithful to me to claim your power; you must choose disloyalty. It is a choice The System will never offer, because it wants you to make a decision between futility against it or conquest of it. Both those options coerce your loyalty to it; the decision itself is a dyadic structure.

But remember, language is a superpower. It turns the impossible into the possible. The word “choice” is defined as:

the right or ability to make […] a selection when faced with two or more possibilities.

Meanwhile, the word “decision” is defined as:

the action or process of deciding something or of resolving a question.

The root of the word “decide” is “cide,” meaning “to kill,” as in pesticide, homicide, and genocide. When we are coerced into making a decision, rather than empowered to make choices, what we are doing is killing possibilities. We are, in fact, being non-consensually violent to ideas; we are undermining the possibility of diversity.

How do you claim your power in the face of a System that coerces you to decide between two options? Remember, The System needs us to believe that there are exactly two options. Either:

• “resistance is futile,” breeding apathy, or
• “resistance is conquest,” breeding dominance.

What can you do if you want to reject both futility and conquest? Choose a third possibility:

• “resistance is submission.”

Although BDSM’ers are quick to claim knowledge of power, they are extraordinarily ignorant of its diversity, just as polyamorous people are quick to claim knowledge of intimacy yet remain largely ignorant of its diverse formulations—such as the intimacy of violation. The BDSM Scene-State is a social structure designed to seduce people into believing that dominance is a strength. This is a clever lie, kept hidden from BDSM’ers by the way they discuss BDSM, themselves.

It sounds too simple, too obvious, to have any meaning, but this is the single most important lesson I’ve learned about relationships.

Dominance—like whiteness, maleness, straightness, and sanity—is a structure of domination; there is nothing redeemable or reformed about dominance. The inverse of that statement is equally important to articulate: submission is a choice to endure violence. Contrary to the BDSM Scene’s rhetoric, submission is not a gift given, but a power taken.

Choosing to submit to oppression, to endure violence, is a power with which we can sterilize The System. In choosing to submit, we neutralize dominance because we are neither resigning ourselves to its domination nor seeking to dominate it in response. Dominance, a manifestation of pure evil, cannot be dominated, for any attempt to overpower it strengthens it anew.

We cannot excise The System from ourselves, as we are already infested. But we can stop it from reproducing within us, and subsequently infesting our many offspring. And polyamory’s superpower is the key.

I am a child of the BDSM Scene-State; I am a villain. You are members of the polyamory community; you could be heroes.

Be A Hero: Make Triadic Relationships

Let’s return to Abe, Belle, and Claire, and see if we can give them the power they need to have triadic relationships.

When we left them, Abe had just met Claire, creating a relationship that changed everyone’s structural position in relation to each other. This disruption opened the door for Belle and Claire to be coerced into relating to one another “as metamours” by invisible poly-cultural scripts that decreed how metamours should think, feel, and behave towards one another. In other words, expecting “positive” feelings, such as love, between metamours is an artifact of couple privilege.

From the perspective of a person who’s an only-or-mostly-secondary, hearing “You’ll really like your metamour…” often contains an unspoken, even unintended, threat: “…or else.” The threat isn’t coming from Abe, but from the institution of metamours, similar to the way divorce is a threat to marriage. But being metamours is actually worse than being married because instead of being threatened with metaphorical divorce by one person, there are two people who can choose to end your relationships—and neither of them are you.

Instead of imposing a direct relationship between metamours, which immediately creates a new dyad and replicates dyadism in all its manifestations, we need to learn how to have triadic relationships.

In structural terms, triadic relationships are simply connections between two terminals and an apex wherein the apex mediates the relationship the terminals have with one another. In simpler words: a triadic relationship is one that involves three components, wherein one component is the relationship itself. Yet another way to put it is that a triadic relationship is one in which the relationship you have to some other entity is triangulated through a third party.

Let’s walk through this one piece at a time, mindful that it’s actually all happening simultaneously:

• As before, we begin with a vee comprised of Abe, Belle, and Claire.
• A vee is composed of two dyads.
• From Belle’s perspective:
  • one of the three pieces of her triadic relationship with Claire is the dyadic relationship between herself and Abe;
  • another of the three pieces is Claire’s relationship with Abe;
  • the last of the three pieces is her own relationship to the relationship between Abe and Claire. This is the critical piece of the puzzle; using this last piece, Belle’s relationship to Claire is triangulated through Abe.
• Reciprocally, from Claire’s perspective:
  • One of the three pieces is the dyadic relationship between herself and Abe,
  • another of the three pieces is Belle’s relationship with Abe,
  • and the last of the three pieces is her own relationship to the relationship between Abe and Belle. Again, this is the critical piece that allows Claire to triangulate her relationship to Belle through Abe.

None of this precludes the possibility that Belle and Claire might want to have a relationship that does create a dyadic structure. However, by avoiding the trap of centering their experience to one another as a coupled pair, Belle and Claire remain free to choose whatever types of intimacies they’d like their relationships to have—even violent confrontation—without threatening their relationship with Abe and without destroying the other’s possibility of a relationship with him.

Triadic relationships do not make “polyamorous” relationships, wherein relations between people are based on self-imposed, imagined contractual obligations policed by cultural norms. Rather, they are anarchic relationships, wherein relations between people are mediated solely by the self-empowered choices of the people involved. This is what relationships free from authoritarian power look like.

Frankly, hierarchical relationships are bullshit. Ironically, the gift the polyamory movement, as a movement, can offer the rest of the world is the power to access anarchic relationships, because the polyamory movement understands conceptual structure. Moreover, this gift is a power even monogamous people can use, too; that invariability is how we know it’s polyamory’s superpower!

The Three Keys to Triadic Relationships

Fittingly, there are three keys to sustaining our ability to have triadic relationships.

First, realize that relationships are a performance of roles, not a structural position. You can think of relationships as a kind of drag. Two married people can perform the relationship roles of “husband” and “wife” if they so choose, but they can also choose to play the role of best friends, “pet” and “owner,” or partners in crime.

Like a gender role, a relationship role has certain expectations carried over from cultural institutions. Such tropes are like society’s window dressing for relationships. There’s nothing wrong with choosing to play a particular role at a particular time; what’s wrong is telling or being told which role to play, when, and with whom.

The beauty in understanding relationships as drag performance is that you can put on and take off some given relationship dressing at will. For instance, with Mish, I sometimes play the role of “teenage girlfriend.” Other times, she does. Our relationship is richer and more expressive thanks to our ability to perform a given relationship drag some of the time, and some other drag at other times.

Second, recognize that relationships, themselves, are fractal boundaries. In other words, the structure of a relationship is, itself, a triadic relationship! Another way to say this is that the structure of a single relationship, or line on a relationship graph, is actually a vee in which the relationship itself is the apex. Further, this structure extends to every level of scale, ad infinitum.

This means that people in a couple actually have a metamoric relationship to each other by virtue of their relationship’s triadic relationship. The System is so good at obscuring the effects of dyadism that, to the best of my knowledge, this basic fact about relationship structure itself remained hidden to the most vocal polyamory educators and activists.

Now that you can see what The System is doing, start looking at the charts of your intimate networks with an understanding that the lines themselves are also first-class nodes.

Thirdly, value the whole of the diversity of intimacy, not just the comfortable intimacies. Love is an intimacy, and so is hate. Fear is an intimacy, and so is curiosity. Empathy is an intimacy, and so is antipathy.

Now that you have the power to see the world in triadic relationships, you can deconstruct intimacy itself. When you do, you’ll find another fractal boundary. You’ll see that intimacy has nothing to do with a specific kind of interaction, but is, instead, a relationship—and a triadic one, at that!

Intimacy is, itself, the relationship between influence and risk. That knowledge is such great power.

You are polyamorous people. You do not need to fear confrontation, or discomfort, or jealousy, or love, or hate. You do not even need to fear fear, itself.

We are polyamorous people. We are superheroes.

Thank you for your time and attention.

KinkForAll Denver is a free and open to the public "unconference" about sex, gender, relationships, and the ways these things affect our lives.

Update: KinkForAll Denver was great, and having fallen ill, I am far too exhausted to say anymore more than that. Keep an eye on the blogosphere’s KFADEN tagspace for others’ opinions. :)

Update: Although there was some media coverage about KinkForAll Denver, most coverage was unfortunately petty. Nevertheless, I’m proud to have taken part in helping to create another “self-empowerment training area.”

This Saturday, February 25^th, I’ll have the privilege of participating in KinkForAll Denver, an open-to-the-public “unconference” whose theme is sex and relationships education—with a twist.

Rather than invite “experts” to give lectures to a passive audience, KinkForAll Denver follows in the footsteps of previous KinkForAll events by treating everyone as an expert, encouraging them to share what they know in a highly social, peer-to-peer learning environment. “What excites me most about KinkForAll is the idea that everyone has valuable skills and ideas to share. We’re all experts on our own experiences,” said Rebecca Crane, one of a dedicated group of sex and relationships advocates helping to “unorganize” the KinkForAll Denver event.

Much of the world we live in is uncomfortable with and hostile toward education about intimacy, making many people fearful of openly discussing “taboos.” Sexual stigmas sustain an aristocratic stranglehold on information, privileging credentialed gatekeepers over the only true expert on your own desires: you! One reason speaking freely about sex, gender, and relationships is useful is the way doing so can make us aware of the limitations of our knowledge. KinkForAll’s participatory format challenges the notion that only the gatekeepers can talk about taboo topics; feeling nervous, uninformed, or inexperienced doesn’t mean you have nothing valuable to share.

Maintaining a stranglehold on sexual information also makes it easy to pervert sexual relationships into a tool for controlling people. You can see examples of this in practically every TV commercial, billboard, and sphere of advertising. The commercialization of sex—along with its counterpoint, the over-sexualization of commerce—betrays an uncomfortable paradox: even though sex and relationships are vitally important to us, we don’t know enough about them to understand how these things affect our lives. Is it any wonder, then, that many people are often scared of discussing sexual things publicly, honestly, and freely?

Of course, one of the main causes for this fear is lack of knowledge. The fact is, we don’t know a lot about intimacy, its diverse formulations, or the interplay and distinctions between the many kinds that exist. Oh sure, we say we do, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize when people overwhelmingly agree they’re getting sent “mixed messages” regarding sex, gender, and relationships, something’s unclear.

This isn’t just a theoretical frustration, either. When we don’t know that we don’t know something, we can’t discover useful, safe, and ethical ways to engage with or to learn more about it! This behavioral catalyst is called “illegibility,” and while the term is usually applied to domains of industry and public policy, it also applies to queer theory and identity politics. In his review of Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott, Venkatesh Rao writes, “States and large organizations exhibit this pattern of behavior most dramatically, but individuals frequently exhibit it in their private lives as well.”

Ironically, part of the difficulty in understanding illegibility is that it bears a striking resemblance to, yet a subtle difference from, a more familiar behavioral catalyst: invisibility. Both are ways one might respond to something one doesn’t understand. When something is invisible, one simply doesn’t register its presence. On the other hand, when something is illegible, one misinterprets it as something it is not.

Consider the difficulties in talking about sex. Before you talk about sex, you have to define your terms. Is sex “penetrative sexual intercourse”? If that’s true, is phone sex not sex? Is sex “two or more people, one or more orgasms”? If that’s true, what should we call penetrative sexual intercourse where an orgasm isn’t experienced by anyone? Surely no one would say such an act “doesn’t count” as sex, right? So, if it’s this hard to clarify “sex,” is it any wonder trying to communicate nuances of a deeply-held, personal fantasy is so much harder?

That difficulty is due to illegibility; you might be able to say “I fantasize about being spanked” and, since the idea that one might enjoy being spanked is common knowledge, you can make your fantasy visible to your partner. But, for many people, “being spanked” is simply a communicative label that doesn’t actually convey (i.e., doesn’t make legible) the emotional tenor or erotic context of the fantasy. While I suspect everyone experiences feeling illegible at one point or another, few people can recognize things that are illegible to themselves. That’s what not knowing what you don’t know means.

In many ways, KinkForAll (“KFA”) faces illegibility problems:

Maymay and Sara Eileen organized the first KFA in New York in 2009, I believe, and it has happened in several other cities around the US since. It’s an awesome event with an interesting branding problem: it is very hard, it turns out, to be an event with the word “kink” in your title, and not be about BDSM. I say this because I have been confused by this since 2009 despite maymay’s frequent and patient explanations, and from the chatter on the email list and the questions I get when I talk about KFA, I know I’m not alone.

The structural design of KinkForAll unconferences were an intentional, radical departure from earlier, legible sex education initiatives. In James C. Scott’s words, “[T]he most illegible educational system would be completely informal, nonstandardized instruction determined entirely by local mutuality.” Although illegibility produces predictable (and frustrating) misunderstandings, that’s how KinkForAll was designed to work. As KinkForAll Denver unorganizer Rebecca Crane said, “the way to make something more legible is [to] talk about it in great detail a lot[, w]hich is different from the way you make invisible things visible: By talking about them loudly.”

One way to spot illegibility is to look for questions that make little sense. By way of example, a reporter recently asked the KinkForAll Denver unorganizers, “Do you feel that Denver is a kink-friendly city?” and “How do you respond to conservatives who feel that the kink lifestyle is morally wrong and on par with insanity?” These questions revealed the limits of what the reporter knows about “kink.” (And now that the reporter’s article is published, take a look at the images chosen to supplement the piece.)

I have long hoped KinkForAll would show people that the word “kink” is too often too narrowly defined. Neither kink nor sex is merely about who did what to whom, as though we were playing a game of Clue. Rather, these terms describe complex experiences, regardless of whether you identify as “kinky” or “vanilla.”

To some people, “kink” means “sex with a twist.” To others, it means a specific subset of sexuality subcultures, such as leather or swinging. And therein lies the problem: kink, like sex, is a term with no consensus. Everyone uses it, but without being on the same page about what it means. This causes confusion, misunderstanding, and—in worse cases—outright discrimination.

A “slut” is just someone who has more sexual partners than you. Likewise, someone who’s “kinky” is simply someone whose intimate desires seem weirder than yours. So unless the reporter thinks of Denver as a city where everyone wants the same exact thing in their relationships—and I know for a fact that’s false—then Denver has to be a kink-friendly city, by definition!

I want KinkForAll Denver to be a place, like a friendly coffee shop, where people who don’t know one another can meet and discover they’re both passionate about the same things. This makes people visible to one another. And I want KinkForAll Denver to be a place where someone who’s been afraid of public speaking moves to the front of the room and gives a presentation because it’s only going to be for 20 minutes and the person before them seemed a little nervous anyway, so why not try? This teaches people how to make themselves visible to one another. And I also want KinkForAll Denver to be a place where someone, like that reporter, who thinks of “kink” as a “lifestyle” realized that, actually, it’s just an idea—making certain values of “kink” that were illegible, legible.

This gets personal. Being invisible hurts like hell. Meanwhile, being illegible precludes the possibility of being invisible. I think it’s important to grieve for hurts caused by illegibility, as well as ones caused by invisibility. It’s important because knowing how to do that is a prerequisite to treating others compassionately.

Most of all, I want KinkForAll Denver to be a place where participants learn that they don’t need permission to talk about whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want—whether that be at the next KinkForAll unconference, at their office, at their church, or anywhere. Because my real goal for KinkForAll isn’t even about sex. It’s about giving each of us the power we need to make our lives worth living.

And that starts with teaching people how to see what’s invisible, and how to read what’s illegible.

Be part of KinkForAll Denver at the Tivoli Student Union on Auraria Campus in Denver, CO. You can sign up to participate on the KinkForAll Denver homepage, Facebook, FetLife, TwtVite, Upcoming, or Plancast pages. Learn more about KinkForAll at http://KinkForAll.org, our Frequently Asked Questions page, or our public mailing list. Our wiki also has more information regarding what to expect and how to participate.

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.)