Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

—Ray Bradbury

They say 2012 is the year of armageddon? Let's bring on the ruckus, I say!

Earlier today, December 31^st, 2011, I filed my thirty-day notice of intent to vacate my San Francisco apartment.

On the one hand, I simply can’t financially afford my little studio in the Tenderloin any longer. No, I don’t have another apartment lined up, and no, I don’t intend to find one. Instead, I’m about to leap off this cliff and grow my wings on the way down. Yes, I’m scared. And, yes, I’ll be okay.

On the other hand, looking back on it all now, leaving not just San Francisco but the very notion of a permanent address behind seems an inevitable path. Early in 2009, I wrote about what kind of man I am. I had few answers, and many questions:

[A]gain, I ask myself, who am I? What is my sexual submissiveness without the dominant presence that revived it when I had given it up those four long years ago? What is my career when I have achieved, for me, an unprecedented level of recognition after 8 long years of being in the workforce? What is my contribution to my own future, and to people like me who are still young children today?

What kind of man am I if so much of the world I live in refuses to see manliness in what I am? Because today, having considered the possibility that I was perhaps a woman at earlier stages of my life, it turns out I am a man. And I am going to make the world know it is good to be the kind of man I am.

Then, in January of 2010, I wrote about what kind of world I wanted to live in. Again, I had few answers, and many questions:

Many of our current societal systems are unsustainable. We all know it. We’ve all felt the effects.

Global financial crisis. Depreciation of college degrees. Ecological disasters. Massive civil unrest resulting in groups of unhappy, violent people (“terrorists”). If we as the human race are going to survive the century, we simply have to change the rules of this game. And that starts with normal people like you and me committing to doing what we want to do, not what we were told we have to do. I wasn’t comfortable playing by the rules of the so-called well-schooled majority, and I’m no longer comfortable playing by the rules of this economy. I now aim to change it.

And I’m not willing to merely survive, because I demand excellence and happiness. I demand it of myself, and so I demand it of you.

[…]

I believe there is more value in doing, being, and getting what I want than in sacrificing it. I believe that there is more richness in the world than can be measured with all the world’s riches.

Doing good work is priceless not because its execution is necessarily of superb quality, but because its value can only be determined by the people who find it useful to them. But I can’t magically transport us out of the economic jail of living paycheck-to-paycheck that so many of us are in. It’s going to take many intermediate steps to get us from here to a place where the value that people create by doing what they love is also what sustains us.

And I have only the vaguest of idealistic dreams for how I’m going to help get us there. But I do have those dreams, and I can’t ignore them.

And so, I began 2011 in something of a haze, “trapped in a world between worlds.”

Holidays or arbitrary markers like a “new year” are difficult times for me. Either they seem an excuse for thoughtless hedonism—parties without purpose, drinks without delight, gifts without generosity, kisses without chemistry—or they are permeated with an intolerable veneer of culturally-imposed “togetherness” that leaves too many out in the cold, often literally. And yet….

And yet, this year has been remarkable. I was angry—oh, so angry—and frustrated that I could not explain exactly why. But, slowly, that began to change. I was sad, and I felt isolated by a system that had conditioned me to feel alone. But that, too, slowly began to change.

I adopted the designation “Social Justice Technologist” without having any real idea of what that means. But in talking to others about it, I refined my own understanding. Yes, I am interested in using telecommunications technologies to improve the world, but I no longer define “technology” so narrowly.

A social justice technologist is someone who works to improve the technology—the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes—of social justice movements themselves. “The technology of social justice” is as social as it is machined; its componentry includes both carbon and silicon. How do people interface with themselves and with their cultures? With other cultures? What is the DNA, the vital code, of a human relationship? Can the conditions necessary to nurture empathic, compassionate communications between human beings and their natural environment be replicated, and if so, how? How do “edge cases,” one-offs, weirdos, become (sub)cultures?

What is the personal genesis of self-empowerment? Are there invariable, atomic elements common among these experiences? If so, what is the most effective way to infuse the largest number of people with these positive experiences in a way that successfully engenders autonomous power for each given individual? Is there a single, critical pressure point on which we as a community can converge to instigate the crumbling of sex-negativity and the rise of an authentically sex-positive worldwide social order? If so, I want to find that pressure point, that crack in the hegemony, and direct every single ounce of strength I have there until I have no life force left.

The world will follow wherever we lead it—kicking and screaming if they must. I promise you that. And that’s when the impossible magnitude of what I was thinking about hit me like a ton of bricks: I can not do this alone.

Thankfully, somewhere in the midst of all this theorizing, all this doing and failing and doing again, something magical happened: I began to understand how to connect with you. One piece, one memory, one story at a time. Bit by digital bit, I reconstituted myself in a form both evanescent yet permanent enough to squeeze sufficiently through the static walls surrounding us and feel the spark of possibility—a mental liberation more akin to psychological rebellion than physical revolution, but an imaginative seed nonetheless. I embraced the fortune of my privileges and the plight of my oppressions.

Most importantly, and most recently, I have learned to refuse the repressions of either of these things. And having that knowledge is such great power.

And that brings me to today, the start of 2012. What could a submissive man do with autonomous power? What ought anyone do with it? Here’s an idea:

[L]et's bomb the factory
that makes all the wannabes.
Let's burst all the bubbles
that brainwash the masses.

And so, while many others are out on this New Year’s Eve, I’m at home taking stock not only of the past year, but also of all the stuff I have. That coffee table I never used, those folding chairs still folded in the corner, the extra pair of linens I never needed to wash because I never used them. Those hand towels. The desk at which I’m sitting and wrote so much. My bed. That pile of electronics in the corner.

It’s all just stuff I don’t need, distractions I can’t afford, things I hardly used. The only reason I have them is because I was afraid of not having them, because I was made to believe I was supposed to have an apartment, with stuff, purchased using money from a job I don’t like to make me feel better about having that job I never really even fucking wanted. And now, I’m not so afraid of that anymore.

So I’m giving it all away. On January 6^th, 2012, I’m inviting you to show up at my door, look around my apartment, find something you like, tell me you want it, and if it’s not already been spoken for, it’s yours. Seriously. Quoting from the event I put on Facebook:

Here’s the deal: I have a lot of stuff. […] There’s no way I can carry it all while I travel. So before I sell most of it, I want to give my personal community (that’s you!) first dibs on taking it all FOR FREE.

All I ask is that if you take, say, a frying pan, next time I’m in your neck of the woods, please make me an omelette on it. :) If you take my squash racquet, treat me to a game of squash next time I’m in town. You get the drill.

After that? I’m off to the East coast again. And, if you haven’t been reading my blog in an RSS reader, you might have noticed my travel itinerary is now visible on my sidebar, along with my current whereabouts. This information, along with details regarding my basic needs like food and shelter, is also on my new “Cyberbusking” page. And if you are reading my blog in an RSS reader, you’ll see a note at the bottom of all my entries reminding you that I’m jumping off this cliff and trying to grow my wings on my way down.

I’ll need help, and I’m still learning how to ask for it; to date, your retweets, reblogs, and the other ways you have engaged with me through this telepathic non-magic of the Internet has been profound, and profoundly appreciated. Thank you. I also want to keep helping others—and I think I can. So in addition to the above, I’ve added a contact form at the bottom of my “Seminars” page where you can tell me more about you and what you’re hoping we can make happen together. Because, as the song goes:

As far as I can tell,
it doesn't matter who you are,
if you can believe there's something worth fighting for.
The colour of an eye,
the glory of a sudden view,
the baby in your arms,
the smile he always shoots at you.

Believing in nothing
makes life so boring,
so let's pray for something
to feel good in the morning.

[…]

So live for tomorrow,
and do what you have to.

My tomorrow is also a callback to my past. After the East coast, and after I complete the legal transition out of my apartment in January, I’m planning to travel to Denver, where an amazingly talented core set of unorganizers have laid the groundwork for KinkForAll Denver, and I’m going to support them however I can. After that, I’ll be presenting at Atlanta Poly Weekend 2012, and then—if I get some help traveling from Atlanta back to Washington, DC—I’ll see about participating in this year’s MOMENTUM Con.

But, really, who knows what the future holds? I don’t.

As for right now, as the revelry of New Year’s Day 2012 becomes louder with each passing tick-tock of the clock, I sit here, preparing myself to say goodbye to the stuff in the walls I once called my house. Truth is, that’s all San Francisco was; a house—never a home.

Maybe I never had a home. Or maybe I ought not have defined “home” so narrowly.

Suddenly the world seems such a perfect place.
Suddenly it moves with such a perfect grace.
Suddenly my life doesn't seem such a waste.

[…]

Come what may.

Save one thing: “the revolution” isn’t “coming.” It’s here, now. Forget New Year’s “resolutions,” reject anything and everything that doesn’t feel right to you; this is a chance of a lifetime. For our own sakes, let’s take it!

And since this is my story, if there’s one thing I hope to learn from this opportunity above all others, I want it to be how to love and be loved in return.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Years pass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She wasn’t even aiming for me.

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

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

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

—“Creep“

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

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Thomas Paine

Kink, in exile:

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

[…]

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

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

Galiana Chance:

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

[…]

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

Professor Chaos:

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

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

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

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

As Tomio Black said,

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

Or, in Chaos’s words:

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you ever go?”

“A bunch of times.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?” I asked.

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

“Your girlfriend doesn’t?”

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

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

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

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

“How do you do it?” he asked at last.

“Do what?”

“Keep writing.”

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

“God, I don’t know,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Great Big Sea

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

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

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

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

There are so many reasons why.

Puny Kingship

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

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

[full page HTML, archived here]

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

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

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

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

Heroes’ Muse

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

Hi MayMay

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heroes make me happy.

Replicant Offspring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refuge in Diasporic Exile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah,” they said. “You’re maymay.”

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

Recently, FeministSub asked me a poignant question:

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

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

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

A Lighthouse in the Park

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

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

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

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

and now they press to tell me that I am brave.
how sharply our children will be ashamed.
taking at last their vengeance for these horrors.
remembering how in so strange a time
common integrity could look like courage.

—Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Shifting her weight nervously from one leg to the other, she fumbled to get the cash out of her purse. Something was clearly bothering her. She was tall, had thin dirty blond hair, and was dressed rather plainly for someone who had clearly made an effort to dress up.

It was a party night at the San Francisco Citadel a couple weeks ago in late May. I volunteered for an hour-long shift, which allowed me to attend the $20 party for free. I was to “work the door,” a position I’d never held at this venue before. When I arrived, the coordinator introduced me to the volunteer who was to “work the cash register.” While my volunteer buddy would sign people in, check their membership, and collect admission fees, I would make sure the line was smooth, that no one got rowdy, and that accidental walk-ins were turned away.

The name for my position was “bouncer.” This is funnier if you’ve met me in person. I’m a short, scrawny white kid with a big nose and a frizzy Jew-fro (and that’s on good hair days). “Bouncer” makes you think of a tall man, probably Black, who’s got a shaved head and huge arms. Apparently this venue requires every event there to have a volunteer fill this role, but I’m no bouncer.

Having “bouncers” at BDSM club nights encourages Scene volunteers to do everything wrong when it comes to creating an atmosphere of safety, trust, and mutual acceptance. Having bouncers, especially bouncers with my physical traits, is absurd security theater that panders to the emotional insecurities of venue owners and Scene regulars. It is not thoughtfully designed to address the fraught, fragile reality of the community’s most valuable constituents: newcomers. Worse, the notions of exclusivity it exemplifies are antithetical to the BDSM community’s stated goal of warmly welcoming newbies, betraying either the community’s inexcusable hypocrisy or its rulers’ idiocracy.

“Bouncers” are just one example. This past Friday, I attended another regular party called Bent, a party I found deeply distasteful, billing itself as being for “youth,” by which the organizers mean people who are “18, 19, 20’s, or 30’s.” In the organizers’ defense, “youth,” in BDSM Scene parlance, does generally mean “under 40,” but that’s some fucked up bullshit in itself.

The following night at the SF Citadel was the inaugural Luscious party, billing itself as being the first BDSM party at the SF Citadel “to welcome people of all shapes.” Inexplicably, the theme of this first event was corsetry. Let me make this perfectly fucking clear: it’s awesome that people of all shapes and sizes can and do enjoy corsets, but the fact that the first party expressly welcoming “people of all shapes” asks you to change your shape is just one more example of how deeply BDSM Scene power brokers have internalized and then re-express overculture oppressions, in this case equating hourglass figures to beauty.

We don’t need to buy that bullshit, nor Scene double-speak. We don’t need “bouncers.” We need “bus drivers.” In 1995, Daniel Goleman showcased a bus driver’s transformative power in his book, Emotional Intelligence:

It was an unbearably steamy August afternoon in New York City, the kind of sweaty day that makes people sullen with discomfort. I was heading back to a hotel, and as I stepped onto a bus up Madison Avenue I was startled by the driver, a middle-aged black man with an enthusiastic smile, who welcomed me with a friendly, “Hi! How you doing?” as I got on, a greeting he proffered to everyone else who entered as the bus wormed through the thick midtown traffic. Each passenger was as startled as I, and, locked into the morose mood of the day, few returned his greeting.

But as the bus crawled uptown through the gridlock, a slow, rather magical transformation occurred. The driver gave a running monologue for our benefit, a lively commentary on the passing scene around us: there was a terrific sale at that store, a wonderful exhibit at this museum, did you hear about the new movie that just opened at that cinema down the block? His delight in the rich possibilities the city offered was infectious. By the time people got off the bus, each in turn had shaken off the sullen shell they had entered with, and when the driver shouted out a “So long, have a great day!” each gave a smiling response.

The memory of that encounter has stayed with me for close to twenty years. When I rode that Madison Avenue bus, I had just finished my own doctorate in psychology – but there was scant attention paid in the psychology of the day to just how such a transformation could happen. Psychological science knew little or nothing of the mechanics of emotion. And yet, imagining the spreading virus of good feeling that must have rippled through the city, starting from passengers on his bus, I saw that this bus driver was an urban peacemaker of sorts, wizardlike in his power to transmute the sullen irritability that seethed in his passengers, to soften and open their hearts a bit.

With this in mind, I mentally said “fuck that shit” to my volunteer role and instead of acting like a “bouncer,” I acted like a bus driver, or a KinkForAll greeter.

The Bus Driver

“Hi!” I’d chirp from my seat on the stool, swinging my legs in the air like a little boy. “Here for Transmission?” That was the name of the party: Transmission, the San Francisco Citadel’s party for trans, and generally queerer, people. Stacks of my own business cards bulged in my pockets. A pen was tucked neatly behind my right ear. I held a hand stamp and an ink pad which I offered to use on anyone who went out for a smoke.

Like many of the other party goers I greeted, the nervous woman nodded her head quickly and replied with a soft “yes” at my inquiry.

“Great!” I said. Then, gesturing to the short line ahead of her, added, “We’ve got a bit of a bottleneck, but you’ll be inside in a jiffy!” I smiled at everyone, but I felt it was especially important that I smiled specifically at her, now.

“Okay,” the woman said. She looked towards the fliers next to me, then at the wall, then the ceiling. She looked anywhere but at me.

“First time at the Citadel?” I asked. She shook her head. “Been here before?”

She nodded. “Mhm, but not for a while.”

“Oh? How long has it been?” I probed.

“6 years,” she said.

“Wow,” I said. “Welcome back!” Stay enthusiastic. Smile. Look directly at her, but not piercingly. Be the bus driver. The woman gave me a half-smile and looked away again. “I’m maymay,” I said, extending a hand for her to shake.

“Joyce,” she said.¹

“Hi Joyce! So, what kept you away from here for so long?”

“Oh,” she started, slowly, as if dipping her toes into a cold pool, “treatment.” I waited, still smiling, looking at her expectantly. “And transition. This will be my debut as a woman,” she said.

“Oh wow.” Then, in a much lower, softer voice, I said, “It can be really, really hard to come out to a party after 6 years.” She nodded again. She wrung her hands together. I put down the hand stamp and ink pad on my thigh and pulled the pen out from behind my ear, a card from my pocket. I wrote my website address on the card as I continued, “I remember how hard my first party after a year of being overseas was for me. It felt really scary to be around people I remembered but to feel so different, myself. But y’know, all it takes is a little work and things will get easier.”

“Yeah,” I heard her say as I finished writing. I looked up at her with my expectant face, holding out my card. She took it. “I’m meeting someone tonight,” she said. “I don’t know where he is. I hope he’s inside.”

“Awesome!” I said. “There are a bunch of people in there.”

By now the small bottleneck of people had cleared and the cashier was ready to help Joyce. She spoke to me while looking over her shoulder. “I’m excited but I’m nervous. We’ve never met.”

“Aw, don’t worry,” I said. “You look great. And that’s what parties are for!” She blushed, stammered a thank you, knocked a small sign on the cashier’s desk over with her purse, and apologized to my volunteer buddy more than she needed to. As she headed inside past the curtained entrance, she turned to me, now smiling, and said she’d let me know if she found her date.

“Okay!” I nodded vigorously. “Have fun!” I called after her. Then, without skipping a beat, I turned to the next party-goer, smiled, and said, “Hi! Here for Transmission?”

I lost track of time—and I was running low on cards. At some point later in my shift, I heard my name. “Maymay!” It was Joyce, holding the curtain open. “He’s here!” she said with a big, radiating smile.

“Wonderful!” I called back. “Go enjoy!” She nodded and disappeared.

Eventually my shift was over, so I headed into the party myself. I had personally invited numerous people who hadn’t ever been to the Citadel before. Most had shown up, perhaps encouraged by the wording of my invitation: “I’ll be working the door for the first hour, so come by at, like, 8:55 PM and you can see me the moment you walk in.”

Once inside, my friends asked me for a tour. “Well,” I said, “this is the social space, where people talk. I mostly just hang out here. There’s a downstairs with play equipment but I don’t often go there.”

“Show us?” they asked.

Grudgingly acquiescing, I lead them downstairs. “So, these are the pictures in the hallway of women looking bottom-y,” I said as we descended the stairwell. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven….” I looked around, “The 7 pictures of women looking bottom-y, to be precise.” I pulled my pen out from behind my ear and wrote down a big “7” on the back of my hand, then continued downstairs.

“And this is the main play space,” I told them. Someone I’d met while greeting people earlier was standing near the entrance to the play space. He had an orange handkerchief tied around his arm. “Oh,” I said, walking everyone towards him, “and this is Uncy Val. Hey, Val, you’re on DM duty tonight?”

“Yup,” Val said.

“Great!” I said. “You can give my friends a way better tour than I can. Would you show them around? This is their first time here.”

“Well, sure!” Val said, jumping into action after a quick glance to another DM nearby.

One of my friends grabbed me by the hand. “Come with us?”

“Nuh-uh. I’m gonna go upstairs and talk to people.”

“Oh, come on. Do that in ten minutes?”

I clucked my tongue and shook my head, pulling my hand away. I’d helped prepare dungeons (including this one) for parties in the past. I didn’t want a tour. I ditched them in the trusted hands of the Dungeon Monitor and went back upstairs.

I can’t stand BDSM play spaces anymore. They make my skin crawl and my blood pressure dangerously high. Too often, they’re lined with men topping and women bottoming or, if I’m lucky, men-dressed-as-women-who-are-bottoming. This is what I’ve come to call “the wall.” At this point, their human bodies look to me like the upholstery for the equipment itself. When I get too close to “the wall,” adrenaline courses through my veins, priming me for fight-or-flight.

I used to find BDSM clubs at least cursorily comfortable spaces. Now they’re a reliable trigger. It’s foolproof, and personally tragic.

The Gadfly

I spent the party itself putting all my energy into being a social butterfly. That’s not something that comes naturally to me, although you’d never guess if you met me at a party. I spoke with more people than I could remember names. I gave away every last card I brought and all the BDSM Workshop Bingo boards I had printed.

I used the BDSM Bingo boards to start some conversations, to end others. (Print your own randomized boards and take them to your local meetings.) Some of the trans people at the party encouraged me to change “demo bottom is a female-bodied person” to “demo bottom is a female-assigned person,” which I later did when I got home. I retold my experiences regarding the inspiration for each of the items on the board when someone asked, and sometimes even when they didn’t.

I wrote notes all over my arm because the SF Citadel doesn’t allow the use of mobile phones or PDAs at parties. By the end of the night, the “7” on the back of my hand had been scratched out, replaced with a “9” then a “10,” then a “12.” I paused my own and interrupted others’ conversations to keep this count updated as conspicuously as politely possible. Of the 12 images of people that I found, seeing all of them depict female submission is typical of these venues.

(Try keeping a count like this at your local play space. For extra credit, keep separate counts to record the presence or, more likely, the lack of racial, age, size, etc. diversity. You’ll probably be told that the art gets “rotated,” perhaps to “feature different artists.” Save your tally, come back when the next artist is featured, and repeat the process. See how long it takes before you get told to “make your own [damn] art.”)

Shortly after necessary pleasantries (“Hi. What’s your name? Where are you from? Have you been here before? What do you like to do?”) I engaged most of the people with whom I spoke in a conversation that could easily be summarized to ardent readers of this site as “See also: my entire blog(s).” Not everyone wanted to have these conversations, I didn’t find the right opening with others, and still others seemed tangentially interested but unable to grasp the most basic concepts, though they tried. I enjoyed making firmer connections—and made a point of exchanging contact information—with those who could and would grok why the BDSM Scene is a severely prejudiced place.

Naturally, many more people can grok these things than will grok them, and those who can but won’t are rightfully called “privileged shits.” Of course, I rarely uttered the phrase “privileged shits” in person at the party, instead opting to ask a lot of people a lot of questions. In a culture of essentialist conformity like the BDSM Scene, questions are disruptive—”you’re like an annoying five year old, always asking ‘why’ questions,” one male top told me at Bent—and being disruptive can be dangerous. Socrates was put to death for his questions, as Plato recounted:

Socrates likens himself to a GADFLY (a horsefly). Just as a gadfly constantly agitates a horse, preventing it from becoming sluggish and going to sleep so too Socrates, by (moving through the City) stirring up conversations in the marketplace, prevents the City from becoming sluggish and careless and intolerant (thinking it knows something when it doesn’t).

Of course, I face no danger of literal death, but rather a sort of social death: ostracization. As you can imagine, I’m not especially well-liked at parties. “Look, I came here to get into the mood to play,” the agitated male top eventually told me in an effort to step away from the conversation I had instigated.

Granted, it was a fair thing for him to say. Our attendance clearly had different motivations. He came to play. I came to collect data.

What I wanted, in that moment, was to tell him what a privileged shit I thought he (and his female submissive partner) is, how fortunate he (and she) is that he (and she) even has a place where he (and she!) can come “to get into the mood to play.” I wanted to express how furious I am that it seems so few in the BDSM community will lift a goddamn finger unless it’s to get their own rocks off, and how mind-bendingly hypocritical responses to my fury like “gosh, maymay really needs to get laid” are. I can only hope such responses come from a place understanding the relevance of those very responses in the bigger picture, rather than from a place that trivializes the sentiment.

Change The Game

As Transmission was winding down, I saw Joyce making out with an acquaintance I had met a few parties ago. Later, at party close when we were all on our way out the door, Joyce flagged me down. “I had such a great time!” she said, and I smiled back at her. “Way better than I ever bargained for!”

“That’s fantastic,” I said. I was genuinely happy to see her literally bounce with delight before scurrying off to collect her things.

Joyce could have had a miserable time that night. I didn’t make her night, but I like to think it was better than it might have been had I not greeted her. An enthusiastic smile from just about anyone can go a long way, but not as far as an empathic one from someone who feels a connection to a similar history.

I really do want to make the BDSM Scene a better place. Part of that means being the bus driver. And part of that means being the gadfly. What does it say about the community’s attempts to be inclusive when someone filled with as much contempt for it as I am is able to extend a warm welcome further and more reliably to its newcomers than they do? And what does it say about the community’s capacity for self-awareness when they spend years dismissing critical questioning?

Of the several different parties at the SF Citadel I’ve been to, I found Transmission to be the most accepting of the kinds of conversations I was starting. I think that’s in no small part due to the fact that the hosts are sensitive to these issues and they’re doing what they can to address them with limited resources. It probably shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did to realize that even though I came away from my own gender exploration firmly affirming that I’m a cisman, due to the way the BDSM community supplants the hegemonic (man/woman) gender dichotomy with its own (dom/sub) power dichotomy, it is trans people with whom I feel most kindred.

This is my activism. I’m going to be at many more parties. I’m going to greet people warmly, genuinely wish them a good time, and politely excuse myself when I get triggered—because I know I will. But I’m also going to point out every last fucked up thing I see, and I’m going to name every shitty problem in BDSM spaces no matter how small or insignificant it may seem to anyone else. And this is me telling everyone that I’m going to do it very, very publicly.

This is what I do at BDSM parties these days. I’m not going to the party to party. I’m going to change the game.

1. This name has been changed.

[A]ll of life is punctuated by stories, some more beneficial than others. At every stage narratives can prepare people for the future or steel them to bear the troubles and routines of the present. Moreover, these stories can disclose other folkways or recall past events that otherwise would be denied or forgotten.
—Anne M. Wyatt-Brown, The Power of Stories

When I first came out to the BDSM community in 2002, I was wary but optimistic. Years of reading about The Scene had left me far from starry-eyed and much closer to well-prepared than I think most people would have been in my shoes. So it was not actually much of a surprise that, after attending a TES Novice Group workshop, I found myself eager to find an environment more suitable for people my age—that is, young adults.

I was only 18, after all.

At that first meeting, I met a Columbia University student who went by the name of Virgil and who introduced himself as the Vice President of Conversio Virium. I learned from him that Conversio Virium, or CV as it was called, was a student BDSM education group hosted by Columbia and that met on Monday nights, and that I should attend. So I did.

In 2002, Conversio Virium was a very small place. Each weekly meeting was attended by no more than five or six individuals. Of those present, three were typically CV officers, then there was me—an odd addition as I was unaffiliated with the University but nevertheless still within the group’s target demographic—and, finally, the obligatory “creepy old guy” who’s present at pretty much every BDSM event the world over.

Few in CV today remember those days because few there today, if any, were there at that time. This fact is one of the invisible wedges that drove itself between the current crop of youth BDSM’ers in New York City and I after I returned from my year in Australia. Despite being chronologically younger than some of them, it is for this reason I feel unforgettably their elder.

Over the course of several years, I became disgruntled with The Scene and eventually left for a year or so in 2004. By the time I returned in 2005 (to be a demo bottom for a singletail presentation), I was pleased to discover that Conversio Virium had continued and, indeed, that it had grown slightly. Meeting attendance had jumped to an average of 9 or 10 people.

One of the new regulars was Eileen, whom I fell in love with for rekindling the spark of submission that The Scene had unmercifully beaten out of me over the three prior years. It generally does that to submissive men and, also generally, to dominant women. Although I was probably more prepared for The Scene than most young men, I was blindsided by the manipulativeness of its more socially-competent leaders, and I wasn’t aware of the multiple, intersecting entrenched bigotries present in this environment.

Meeting Eileen and, through her, an entirely new social circle of young, mostly queer kinksters who congregated around my old stomping ground of Conversio Virium was a breath of fresh air after the difficult, mostly solitary year I’d just had. Plus, I knew the ropes pretty well, and some of the older folks whom I knew from places like TES still recognized me. It was the closest I ever felt to being “home,” having heard the word used to describe The Scene by others so often.

It wasn’t quite home for me, though, because Eileen and I were still a bit of an oddity. We were then, and remained until we left for Australia, the only male submissive/female dominant couple. But we were accepted there and became, thanks to my familiarity with the larger “mainstream” BDSM community and her own seniority within the Conversio Virium crowd, certain kinds of leader figures for the group.

My time with Eileen, well-documented in the archives of this blog, was without a doubt some of the best times of my life. In 2006, a smear piece was written about Conversio Virium in the NY Daily News, and when conservative talking-head Ann Coulter was brought on to FOX News to discuss the seedy “sex clubs” in Columbia University, I revamped Conversio Virium’s website (see the 2004 version), doing what little I could at the time and the only thing I understood as activism: protecting my “home” and my friends. Thanks to Ms. Coulter, CV’s membership quadrupled almost over night, and suddenly we were the shining new center of youth BDSM education in the New York City and Tri-State area.

After that, weekly CV meetings averaged 35-40 people in attendance. Then in 2007, as part of the seemingly never-ending churn of newcomers, came a small man named Ken. He was a quiet boy at the time, almost silent, and seemed almost afraid to smile, far less to touch and be touched. He wore baggy clothes, glasses, and was taking computer courses for school, unsure of exactly what he wanted to do for a living.

Recognizing some of myself in him, I made it a point to greet him warmly at every meeting, and to talk to him openly in an attempt to get him to do the same. With no small hesitancy, he eventually disclosed his submissive self-identity along with some common sexual desires. He liked cross-dressing, he told me, and he wanted to be submissive to women.

He was, at first, often reluctant to join us for post-meeting dinner at the pizzeria (called Pinnacle back then on 115^th Street and Broadway), just off campus, but as I often gently cajoled him to join us he became less reluctant to the idea. He would sit at the corner of a table and I watched him smile at certain parts of our conversations, like discussions of men bottoming or in service to their tops—mostly the same parts I thought I would smile at if I were him. In a few short months it would be 2008, and Eileen and I would be headed to Australia, and we would have to say goodbye to the group.

So, wanting to ensure Ken’s place at CV, I encouraged him to run for Vice President that year. To my delight, he did, and I smiled to myself when I heard the news from the other side of the world. Australia, in the end, was a painful time for me, only in part (but no small part) because my relationship with Eileen did not survive the trip. I was eager to return to America in early 2009.

I will never forget the first play party I attended after I returned from my year in Sydney. It was difficult for me to go because I knew it would trigger so many memories I’d sometimes avoided. Nevertheless, I wanted very badly to have a good time and I thought that, maybe, I could make something of a fresh start.

When I arrived at the party, a half-naked young man with fresh bruises on his thighs and ass walked up to me and gave me a hug. I was taken aback. It was Ken. I almost didn’t recognize him.

“Ken!” I remarked, surprised at his openness. “You seem…good!”

“Yeah,” he said in that sort of far-away voice I remembered endorphin rushes induce.

“I’m glad,” I told him. And I was.

Ken cocked his head slightly and looked me straight in the eye. “Maymay,” he said, “can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“How do you get people to, y’know, play with you in ways that you really want?” he asked me. I blinked, slightly confused, almost dumbstruck.

I asked for an explanation, and he briefly told me of some of the play he’d had with people. It was fun, he recounted, plenty of new experiences and very nice. He talked of how he loved the physical connection and the whole ritual of negotiation, play, then aftercare. Although he didn’t remark on it, I could sense how relatively new, welcome, and unlike other social experiences it was for him. But all that said, he told me the play wasn’t quite what he wanted, and he found it difficult to describe to me the nuances between what he was experiencing and what he wanted to experience.

“Ken,” I responded finally, still holding him by the shoulders and feeling his arms around my waist, “I’m honored that you came to me to ask this, but I’m afraid you’re asking the wrong guy. I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe we can talk another time, when we’re not at a party.”

He smiled warmly, nodded, and said, “Yeah, okay.”

“Have fun tonight,” I told him.

“You, too,” he said to me before slinking away.

I stood near the middle of the room where we had just embraced, almost frozen. I watched him walk away, his slink turning to a scamper as he went off to go sit in someone’s lap. I felt a familiar storm brewing deep within me, so I quietly walked to the bathroom, shut the door, and locked it. I looked at myself in the mirror, as if about to ask my reflection what was happening.

On the one hand, Ken’s question and the brief retelling of his experiences sounded very familiar to me. On the other, here was this younger man, fresh from a scene he clearly enjoyed, asking me, fresh from a break-up and a year of feeling sexually and culturally isolated from everyone except my no-longer-partner, how to get play. I was, in fact, genuinely surprised. The pupil had become the teacher.

In the flash of a single moment, I suddenly felt emptier than I’d ever felt before, then—FLASH—I suddenly felt a wave of gladness, then—FLASH—I suddenly felt the rushing heat of unbridled jealousy, then—FLASH—the burn of resentment. I stared at myself in the mirror; the storm was behind my eyes.

Emptiness: What am I doing at this party? Why am I even here?

Gladness: In Conversio Virium those years ago, I had helped create a space where at least one young man not unlike myself had a better experience than I did when I first arrived there.

Jealousy: There, in Ken, I had just seen a young man I wanted to be and never will be. I never had someone welcome me at BDSM education groups in the warm, encouraging way I welcomed him. I never had someone talk with such genuine, gentle force with the express purpose of creating a social atmosphere in which I could feel comfortable disclosing my own desires.

Resentment: How dare the BDSM community fail me so spectacularly! How dare they perpetuate this rank failure of acceptance for submissive men like Ken and I? It’s not fair that I have to deal with this, that the daily reminders pile up, invading and ultimately destroying my own relationships!

Emptiness, gladness, jealousy, and resentment, all at once. I stared into my own eyes in the mirror for a long while. I think I was trying to calm the storms.

Eventually, I realized that although I couldn’t just snap my fingers and make everything better, hating the way things had been for me was a powerful motivator to make things better for others. So I resolved, mindfully, never to forget the power of discontent, of frustration, or of anger. Looking at myself in the mirror and seeing myself feeling emotionally conflicted, watching my eyes tear up at the same time as I felt my fists clench, I finally understood who and what I was fighting for.

I may one day be able to forgive those who knowingly or unknowingly contributed to my pain in the past, but I will never, ever forget.

We ought always hate the status quo. Always.

1. “Every great advance starts with an intuition”
2. “Unreality” and the politics of experience
3. How I got invited to the Kink, Inc. Armory after all
4. The SF Armory Tour
5. The After-After Party
6. Reflections on my Interactions

“Every great advance starts with an intuition.”
—Ralph C. Merkle

It has long been my assertion that among their many other problems, both the mainstream culture and the BDSM Scene’s subculture is toxic towards the possibility of submissive men’s happiness. Within this scope, I have also long asserted that one of the strongest contributing factors to this unjust reality is the fundamentally sexist “cultural pollution” produced by most pornographers. Finally, within this grouping, the people I hold most responsible for the continuation and mainstreaming of this willful psychological-environmental destruction of submissive men’s happiness is Kink, Inc.¹

These assertions came solely from years of introspective self-reflection coupled with intense observations—until the night of April 12, 2011. Before that night, the sum total of my knowledge about Kink, Inc. was necessarily filtered through hearsay, PR spin, or my own painstaking deconstructions of their product. After all, what polluter would have it any other way?

This bred within me a certain hesitancy because I knew that my intuition appeared to others as unfounded conviction—their mental model of Kink, Inc. informed their own feelings that contradicted mine. Yet despite this lack of access, the more I scrutinized pornography’s landscape and examined its ecosystem, the more I was able to describe the ideological toxins companies like Kink, Inc. were throwing into the rivers: endless torrents of sexist iconography repressing our sexual imaginations.

The stronger I articulated my opposition to this toxicity, the more a predictable pattern emerged among its vocal defenders. That pattern is an old, tired one we know all too well. Paraphrased, it goes something like this: “It’s not my responsibility to care how my privilege affects you, it’s your job to buy into the system I’m a part of so that you can struggle to influence it in ways I never had to bother to think about.” Those who most often make this argument are a predictable bunch, too: (usually) old, (usually) straight, dominant men. This is no coincidence.

For example, after I took Kink, Inc. to task over their disgusting “virginity” press release, I went to a night of Bawdy Storytelling, where a 24 year old woman introduced herself to me as a sometimes-model for Kink, Inc., and identified herself as a switch. Her partner, a 38 year old self-identified dominant man, wrote to me a few days later taking issue with what I had written about Kink, Inc.:

You can tell from my profile pics that I spend quite a bit of my playtime at the armory…good digs, free booze and snacks with no cover, professional photography of good memories…[sic.] and I know all the people who are involved fairly well […]. We have spoken privately about Nicky [sic.] not being the kind of with-it woman who might be a better representative of female submission, as well, but I don’t view the company as showing such a lack of corporate responsibility that they deserve so much vitriol, because even as you say they are selling a non-material fantasy, and that there is nothing wrong with said fantasy, you decry the fantasy in the release, which is actually accurate in that it is what people would be buying.

When I challenged him that his own experiences, such as ample “playtime at the armory,” might color his view, he explained where he’s coming from:

Certainly, I am blessed to live in an area that has so many opportunities for the expression of my sexual predilections, but it is not my nature that drew me to the area. Rather it was the area that drew out my nature. I was one of those ignorant people who got a take-away from kink sites long before I’d ever spoken to somebody about my darkest fantasies. I saw manifested what had always been going on in my own head, which I was ashamed and scared of, and I saw that it could be done in an ethical and consensual manner. I didn’t even recognize that I was dominant or sadistic until I saw James Mogul patterning a way to do that. Once I did, I could avail myself of the great educational opportunities that are all around us here, but without it, I would likely have remained someone who thought BDSM was for people who inexplicably needed props for sex. I never would have considered it the responsibility of that site to complete my kinky education any more than it is the responsibility of my kindergarten teacher to make sure I understood calculus, and this is a sentiment that I have heard expressed innumerable times by newbies to the scene. That is how I, and those others, came to understand that what we wanted could be what we have, and in true trickle-down fashion, that is why we champion it to others.

[…]

I’ll also address your real issue: When it comes down to it, you don’t like that you can’t get the porn you want, with what you would call a valid perspective on male submission, or with the aesthetic that you get off on. But, you assert that you have never paid for porn, which might give you some influence on the content’s survival in the marketplace […] and you’re not, as far as I’m aware, producing your own porn that might satisfy your requirements (although you’re aggregating that produced and/or paid for by others).

[…]

I would encourage you to put aside emotion and ulterior motives, and view your own biases before maligning others, but I’d say the same thing to Glenn Beck.

(Emphasis mine.)

This is the kind of person I hate for their unabashed, unapologetic, uncritical one-sidedness. First of all, the whole point of porn is that you don’t need to make it yourself. But beyond that, he manages to downplay his privilege while acknowledging the very reason he has it in the first place: the industry almost exclusively produces depictions of what has already “always been going on” in his own head. The fact is and has always been that there is no equivalent for male submission represented by Kink, Inc. and this is why their consumers, like him, remain ignorant of the problems that are so painfully evident to me.

I started MaleSubmissionArt.com to counter the systemic bias of over-representing dominant men’s gazes in porn and the net result has been amazing. In 2008, when the project began, if you searched Google for “submissive men,” you would be accosted with images of women tied up. Today, you’ll still find plenty of images of that sort when you do a Google search for “submissive men,” but now most pictures of men that appear on the first page have been, at one point or another, featured on MaleSubmissionArt.com. I literally changed the landscape of the Internet’s porn featuring men who are submissive, and I am angry because the relative ease with which I did so undeniably implicates companies like Kink, Inc. and their defenders in not only doing nothing to combat the sexist monopoly of male desire and female desirability, but in perpetuating it.

I’m sure that some “pro-porn” cultists will take issue with me again. I can almost hear their accusations already: “you’re being anti-porn!” Nonsense! I am pro-electricity and I readily campaign alongside environmentalists who decry air pollution and unsafe nuclear power plants. I am the furthest you can get from a militant vegan and I readily campaign alongside food justice advocates for more humane (and cleaner) farms. In much the same way, I am absolutely “pro-porn” and I want to foment justifiable anger from sex-positive advocates against the imposition of a narrowly-defined sexuality of submissive men that is neither representative of nor created by submissive men.

The dominant man who wrote me perfectly exemplifies the sexist defense of such an imposed, narrowly-defined status quo, and he highlights the fundamental willful ignorance in the BDSM community: the intersection of sexism and domism lies at the root of why BDSM’ers defend Kink, Inc’s pollution. Such defenders cannot imagine the relentless cognitive dissonance someone like me went through when I viewed possibly the very same images by the same producers but responded with sobs instead of orgasms. In my more cynical moments, I feel like even that description is too kind: in actuality, most of these men have not understood that an experience so different from theirs, as I had, is even possible.

“Unreality” and the politics of experience

Of course, I already knew denying others’ lived experiences—and their intuition—was, itself, predictable. In fact, I learned this lesson as I entered puberty. For me, a sexual interest in “whips and chains” was not a confusing thing; I had a pretty good visceral and even academic sense of what fantasies involving being controlled were about, thanks to the Internet. Instead, I mostly struggled with my sudden and strong sexual attraction to other boys.

I remained hesitant about my own interest in same-sex encounters for a number of years. I experienced a string of swift, fleeting crushes that could go nowhere experientially for a whole host of reasons, not least of which was my young age. At the time, my same-sex explorations were wholly conceptual, limited to the iconography of homosexual sex and relationships I was able to find (which was plentiful) and resonate with (which was far less plentiful).

Though I questioned my sexual orientation, and then I questioned my gender identity—largely due to my sexually submissive inclinations, no less—intuitively, I knew I was bisexual. Nevertheless, with no corporeal anchor, I couldn’t “really” be bisexual. Despite my intuition, my own standards for self-determination were just not going to be accepted by others, even though I knew I’m bi in much the same way I knew I liked getting tied up.

I mean, I fantasized about boys! About penises! About masculine things, traditionally depicted and otherwise! Yet despite this, and despite my undeniable familiarity with myself, others would not treat my intuition as anything other than unfounded convictions. To proclaim my bisexuality would be tantamount to proclaiming my insanity, since loudly proclaiming unproven convictions others do not share is interpreted as insanity regardless of reality. The socially valid standard for claiming sexual identity was then and is still too often having “an actual Relationship” with the appropriate person, or at least to have sex with them.

That is a shitty standard.

Then, at last and in an unexpected way, I started having “actual Relationship” feelings for a guy. The “metal boy” was a quiet revelation. I felt like it had confirmed something I’d always suspected, and although the experience changed little about reality, it gave me a form of validation no one should ever need: I “really” am bisexual.

That’s very much how I feel about Kink, Inc. and most BDSM iconography I hate so much. Whenever someone belittles me for “whining” about my sexual circumstance, they erase the enormous effort it takes for me to stay alive in a world apparently designed to devalue submissive men’s experiences. Whenever they argue paying for porn I hate will have “trickle-down” benefits for me, they are telling me my place in life is beneath theirs.

These offensive arguments discount my intuition. Intuition is simply unexplained knowledge. And even though before the night of April 12 the sum total of my knowledge about the effect mainstream BDSM porn had on many submissive men consisted of hearsay and PR spin, one thing’s for damn sure: those are valid experiences, sourcing real knowledge, informing a viewpoint that deserves to be heard just as much as many others. In other words, I won’t buy into the shitty standard that says my intuition isn’t a good-enough argument.

On the other hand, when I can make a point by using the standard of concrete experience and firsthand knowledge—when I can say my information comes directly from the horse’s mouth—I might as well.

That’s what happened on April 12: through a series of unexpected events, I got invited to the Kink, Inc. Armory. My interactions with the people there further convinced me that significant portions of their staff and their consumers believe sexist, awful, offensive things. Many of them are ignorant of sexual diversity but, more to the point and indeed in their own defense, the culture of the institution that is a mainstream BDSM/fetish porn studio is itself a problem.

It’s only a matter of time before I figure out how to explain all my unexplainable knowledge—my intuition. My unexpected time at the Armory is simply one more experience in a string of lifelong experiences that encourage me to raise people’s expectations so that the insiduous toxins in Kink, Inc.’s products won’t seem worthy of the praise I know they don’t deserve.

How I got invited to the Kink, Inc. Armory after all

The last time I thought much about Kink, Inc. was after I had been convinced I’d probably never again get the opportunity to talk to anyone there. But the world is small. And San Francisco is smaller. And small worlds often collide. And that’s interesting.

I recently attended an invite-only event which bills itself as “an experiment in viral media,” called “Swagapalooza.” Quoting from its front page:

On April 12th, the world’s most-followed bloggers, tweeters, and digital influencers will gather in San Francisco to judge five-minute auditions from the creators of the latest, greatest, and most unexpected new products… And to connect with each other.

I’m skeptical of being among “the world’s most-followed bloggers, tweeters, and digital influencers,” and judging from how most of the other people I was there “to connect with” told me they felt similarly, I’m confident the invite-only nature of the event was actually San Francisco’s code for “we have limited space and want it filled.”

Nevertheless, I was happy to be invited and get the opportunity to mingle. Which I did, I’ll freely admit, to the exclusion of paying even the slightest attention to anything on the stage—people who aren’t on stage are usually way more interesting than those who are, anyway.²

Anyway, I had a good time at Swagapalooza, but things didn’t get personally interesting until a woman I was speaking with told me the “after party” was going to be held at Kink, Inc.’s Armory. My ears perked up. “Oh, really?” I asked. “Are we all just walking over there or what?”

“That guy over there,” she said, pointing into the distance, “is going to walk us over.”

I looked around the dark nightclub but couldn’t see who she was pointing out. “Are you gonna come?” I asked her.

“Yeah!” she said excitedly.

“Great! Me too. Walk me over to this guy?”

She did, and introduced me to Terry, a tall African-American man with tightly curled hair, whose hand I shook as he stamped a red “San Francisco Armory Tour” emblem under my wrist. Terry, I learned, is Kink, Inc.’s Affiliate Program Manager and had been working for the company for several years. He asked me what I do and I told him that “I’m a BDSM blogger.” I asked if he knew Chris K., and he said he did.

“Chris and I had arranged to meet a little while back,” I told him, “but we never did. I was disappointed and, honestly, I felt a little lead around by the nose.”

Terry looked a little surprised. “Oh, I’m sorry. That sucks,” he said in a perfectly genuine tone.

“It does,” I agreed. “But it’s really nice to meet you.”

“Yeah, you too. And we should talk sometime about blogging,” he offered.

“Absolutely. I’ll follow you to The Armory?” I asked. Terry nodded quickly, getting pulled aside to go stamp some more wrists.

I picked up some more swag and found myself in a conversation with several out-of-towners who had also been invited. I’d lost track of Terry at this point, but everyone there wanted to head to the Armory. “It’s 14th and…something?” they asked.

“Don’t worry,” I told them, “I know where it is.” They thanked me as I lead the way, talking business while we walked.

We arrived at The Armory only a few minutes after Terry’s group, who were still signing into the building at the security desk. After offering our respective John Hancocks, Terry led us up a staircase to The Upper Floor. Yes, that Upper Floor.

The SF Armory Tour

Numerous people were milling about The Upper Floor’s large, Edwardian-style lounge. The room was decorated with deep reds and lavish furniture, and it was so large that only the half we occupied was lit. Bondage frames and other amenities whose use was obvious lined the pillars, and in the fireplace along one wall was a statue of a naked woman sitting cross-legged, bound in hemp rope. The bound statue added that obligatory whiff of maledom/femsub atmosphere I’ve learned to expect and dread at eroticized venues like this—they all have it.

Next to the fireplace, enormous double doors lead to another, smaller room in which a cadre of other visitors for the evening sat amongst themselves. The familiar sound of sonic booms echoed through the chamber, sporadically interrupting conversations and injecting a nervous, giddy energy into visitors’ speech. Someone’s cracking singletails, I thought. I found myself near a dresser filled with alcohol and a young, blond woman pouring drinks in a bit of a rush.

“What’ll you have?” she asked me.

“Is that 1800?” I asked, pointing at the distinctive, trapezoid-shaped bottle. She nodded. “That, please.”

“On the rocks?”

“Sure. Thanks. What’s your name?” I asked as she reached for the tequila.

“Nicki Blue,” she said.

“Oh, you’re Nicki. I’m maymay. It’s good to meet you.” Nicki just nodded again, struggling with the bottle. She had to remove the plastic wrap—it hadn’t been opened before—and then she started twisting the top, but it wasn’t opening.

Suddenly a loud yet sweet-tempered voice boomed from the entryway. “Ladies and gentlemen! My name is Leo, and I’ll be your tour guide this evening. In a minute we’ll begin the Armory Tour, so if you’ll please gather in the hallway and follow me,” the voice announced.

Nicki grunted in frustration at the bottle of tequila. “Can you help me?” she asked a nondescript man standing next to us, waiting for his drink. He plucked the cork out of the top of the bottle and handed it back to Nicki, who hurriedly poured several shots worth into a green-tinged plastic cup and handed it to me. I took the cup, thanked her again, and bid her farewell.

As I was heading towards the hallway to join the other tourists, I bumped into Terry again. “Maymay,” he said, “this is John, our Vice President.” An even taller man with white skin and dark hair was standing next to Terry. His blue glasses were thick-rimmed but stylish, and he was wearing a slick, business casual jacket, button-down shirt and jeans. His face had a boyish look, with a slightly pudgy, button-nose and a rounded, clean-shaven jawline. Those features were the only things about him that signalled anything remotely diminutive.

“Oh, you’re maymay,” John said with surprising gusto. He placed one of his hands at the back of my neck and began walking with me towards the hallway, where the Armory Tour was assembling. There was something immediately recognizable, yet uncomfortable, about the way he held me by the neck, something unmistakably domineering. This is just like how (Sara) Eileen used to hold on to me possessively when we walked down Broadway in New York, I remember thinking to myself. In another context, this could be hot. But not like this. I looked down at the cup of alcohol filled way past the halfway point in my hand, then craned my neck looking back at John. There would be no way I’d drink much more liqueur while I was in the Armory, I told myself, but I was definitely going to hold onto that cup and smile about it.

John’s practiced welcome was almost lubriciously warm. We exchanged a few words and he wished me a good time on the Tour before he made a quick about-face back into the Upper Floor’s large bedchamber. In hindsight, I kind of wonder what was going through his mind. Maybe something like, “I thought maymay would be taller.” Who knows?

Leo, a conventionally attractive Latin man and our tour guide, was dressed in leathers from head to toe. His jacket was open in the front, offering a peek at a studded leather chest harness. His head was shaved, but I could see his black hair beginning to grow at their roots again, just like his beard. Leo stood at around my height, and proudly. He moved quickly, taking long strides, often turning swiftly at their ends as if he were performing a well-rehearsed ballet. Two coiled whips swung loosely in his hands, and I could tell they were a high quality leather (I’m guessing 9 plait or higher) even though I never got that close a look at either.

Leo began the tour with a joke of one sort or another, and I wish I could remember it with precision because it caused me to (half-)joke back. What I do remember is a woman standing across from me joining the exchange with her own remark to the effect of, “Careful! Bet you don’t want to get hit with those things,” and a gesture at Leo’s singletails.

“Now you’re making assumptions about me that may not be accurate,” I quipped back.

Soon, Leo lead us up and down The Armory’s stairwells, through one room and then another. At first I listened to his descriptions of the sets and the shoots, but then I flitted about the crowd trying to overhear tourists’ conversations. They were ribbing one another in both predictable and interesting ways, and I found this meta-people-watching far more fascinating than the probably-scripted tour lines.

They took pictures—lots of them. They posed for sets. They joked more.

Leo walked a tightrope of handing them sensational tidbits (“we had 40 women in here!”) while getting the crowd of tourists to behave. (“Follow me! Please don’t play with the lights!”) His exasperation at misbehavior may have indicated he’d lead this tour often. He talked about the “slave quarters,” the “24/7″ nature of The Upper Floor. Although he didn’t call it out explicitly, all of the references he made to “the slaves” used female language and women as examples.

I asked the obvious: “Why no men?”

“It’s hard to find male submissives that meet our standards,” Leo said.

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you later.” He was focused on leading the tour, so I let it go.

At one point, straggling behind most of the group, I set my drink down and stopped to examine what looked like a key-card door lock. It was a slender black box with curved edges and a glowing red rectangle in the middle. “I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,” a fellow tourist said, stopping to watch me.

“I touch a lot of things I shouldn’t touch,” I shot back, looking up at him from an angle. I met his gaze after I’d already answered, and a moment later he quickened his pace and rejoined the group. I grabbed my cup—it was still full, but I had let it slosh around and spill some here and there—and rejoined the tour group myself.

“This is so interesting,” I heard a man I’d met earlier, over a slice of pizza at Swagapalooza, say to himself. When we first met, he asked what I did and I told him “I blog about sex and technology,” eliciting a grin. “How do the girls react when you tell them that?” he wanted to know, so I put on my best I’m-not-actually-tired-of-this-fucked-up-gender-dynamic-face and responded, “That’s a long conversation that I could have with you some other time.” On the tour, I quickened my pace and caught up with him.

“What’s interesting to you?” I asked.

“It’s like a big movie studio,” he said, looking in every direction except at me. Stepping through a doorway, we stood on a wooden ramp overlooking a massive cellar. The brightest lights were in the distance, beyond multiple sets of pillars.

Leo raised his hand to signal for silence. “Who here is a fan of DeviceBondage.com?” The man I was just speaking to gave a supportive shout, unknowingly offering me slightly more justification for rolling my eyes at him. The tour was making me feel like I was in one of those stereotypical BDSM chat rooms, only it wasn’t in cyber-space, it was physical. As the rest of our group filed out of the room, the vocal Device Bondage fan and I took mutual snapshots of one another with our cameras.

When we headed back to the upper floors, I found myself standing near Leo. “What I meant to tell you earlier,” he said, “is we try to book pretty people, but they don’t like to get hit.”

“You get plenty of women,” I said.

“Well, doms are a dime a dozen,” he told me, motioning for others to keep moving. “It’s harder to find men who’ll bottom.”

“Why do you think that is?” I asked.

He shrugged and said something I couldn’t quite parse because it didn’t make any sense to me. Momentarily pensive, I let myself fall back to the rear of the group. Earlier in the evening, Leo had said that “they like to use me mostly as a bottom.”

As I returned to the ground floor, some people were saying their goodbyes and heading out the door. Others were standing in groups, so I approached one and introduced myself.

The After-After Party

I’d just met Yan, who works in marketing for Kink, Inc. and is from New York. He was balding with a bit of a scruffy beard, a bit whiter but otherwise not unlike my own beard, and wore somewhat slovenly clothes; a gray sweatshirt and jeans that seemed a size too big, with a belt keeping them in place. Yan was a soft-spoken guy, clearly amiable. He told me about his employment history through one company, then another, and then finally “at Kink.”

“Have you always wanted to work here? I mean, do you have a personal interest in BDSM?” I asked.

“Well, yeah,” he said, between some stops and starts.

“And what role do you see yourself in?” I pressed.

“Well, top,” he said, becoming a little quieter.

“So, why do you think there are so many more women bottoms here?” I asked pointedly.

“Oh, well, it’s genetics,” he said, growing louder. I sensed a sudden confidence in his tone.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, that’s just the way most people are,” he told me, and went on to recite a familiar, predictably offensive, practically brainwashed set of assertions to make the point. But thankfully not too many, because before long Terry joined us and I turned away from Yan to greet him with a smile and another handshake.

“Want another drink?” Terry asked Yan and I.

I lifted the cup I was holding to eye-level, showing that it was still half full. “Working on one, but I’ll join you for another.” The three of us started up the stairs. “So what about you?” I asked Terry. “Is this just a job or do you have a personal interest in this stuff?”

“I’ve been interested in this kind of lifestyle for a long time,” Terry told me as we approach the landing to the second floor.

“Is this the first place you started learning about BDSM? I mean, did you meet people by going to community or educational groups or did you mostly meet people through working here?”

“No, yeah, mostly work,” he answered. It took a minute for that to sink in. By then, we were back at The Upper Floor.

This time, the room was emptier. A half-dozen or so chairs surrounded a low, circular table on which an extravagant centerpiece rested. I took a seat facing the dresser in the back corner where Terry headed to get more to drink. Several Swagapalooza organizers and sponsors were sitting to my right. To my left were a couple of women I didn’t recognize, each draped across the laps of men I didn’t immediately recognize.

Everyone had a glass in their hand. Conversation was easy, and smooth. I turned to the Swagapalooza guys next to me, and asked an Asian man named Allan Young, “So how did the Swagapalooza after party end up here at The Armory?” I got a (predictably non-committal) answer along the lines of, “They knew a guy who knew a guy,” and my conversation with them got even more boring from there, nice as I’m sure these folks were. (Although they did recommend I read Tribes, by Seth Godin, which may be a good recommendation.)

As they left, I turned my attention to the group across the table from me. A woman with dark hair wearing a black two-piece had just mentioned something about contraception, questioning whether taking them may, in some circumstances, make a woman “half-pregnant.” I decided to butt in.

“You can’t be half-pregnant,” I asserted. “Pregnancy’s like water. Being half-pregnant is like being half-wet. You can’t be half-wet; you’re either wet, or you’re dry. Similarly, you can’t be half-pregnant; you’re either pregnant, or you’re not.” I got some laughter, some wry smiles. The tall woman raised an eyebrow at me.

“What if you take emergency contraception?” she asked. She was standing next to an equally tall man wearing the closest thing to a beige suit that still somehow managed to not look like a formal suit I’ve ever seen. In stark contrast to the woman’s concentrated gaze, he was grinning.

“Still. You’re pregnant until the EC takes effect. Then you’re not,” I said plainly.

At this, the man walked around the backs of the chairs in the little circle around the table and sat down in the empty one next to me. The woman followed, taking the seat immediately next to him. Introducing myself, I learned that I was speaking to James Deen (homepage) and Princess Donna, well-known performers on numerous Kink, Inc. websites. Donna also directs.

“What about you? What do you do?” James asked me.

“I’m a sexual freedom activist,” I said.

“A…?” James asked, leaning forward.

“A sexual freedom activist. It means I do a lot of writing and public speaking and political organizing advocating for the rights of people like, well, like you. LGBT people or people who do BDSM. That sort of thing.”

James leaned back in his chair, smiling wider. “I am so glad you exist,” he said. He intoned the words slowly, as if emphasizing each one independently.

“Well, thank you,” I said, suddenly feeling a little uncomfortable. I did not expect to be so directly valued. “I used to be a full-time web developer. Activism doesn’t pay,” I lifted my feet to waist level to show off the multiple, massive holes in my Converse sneakers. James wore the exact same kind, high-top and all.

“Aw, man, I’ll buy you new chucks,” James offered.

“Well, thank you again!”

“What size shoe are you?”

“I’m an 11.”

“Me, too.”

James, Donna and I talked for hours—two, to be precise. We were occasionally joined by a few interlopers, notably a skinny man who identified himself as one of Swagapalooza’s consultants, and whose shit-eating grin was probably visible a mile away. He was, put bluntly, the awkward guy whose excitement at being here—a porn studio!—could not be missed. This was perhaps most blatantly illustrated when James started talking about “Blow-J’s” and “G-Bangs,” apparently his own colloquialism for “blowjobs” and “gangbangs” that he found incredibly funny.

“C’mon, say it,” James goaded me.

“What?” I asked.

“Blow-J!” he said again, this time with a drawl. “Just say it. You know you want to.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll say it to you.”

James laughed. “All right. Go ahead.”

I shot James my best, if faked, ‘come hither,’ look and said, “Wanna give me a blow-J?” This elicited the laughs I knew it would. I took the opportunity to press the question. “No, seriously, do you do boy-boy scenes?” I asked James.

“Nah,” he said. I shot him my best, if faked, ‘I’m disappointed,’ look. “I’m just not into that,” he continued. “I mean, I’ve got no problem with anyone else doing that. If there’s a guy sucking another guy’s dick in the room, I’m like, ‘that’s cool, it’s just not for me.’”

“That’s fair,” I said.

That’s when the interloper jumped in. “Okay, so, now that the discussion is on this topic, it’s been my dream ever since I was a teenager to be in porn,” he started, and I struggled not to tune him out. “How does one become a porn actor?” he asked, eliciting a (predictably non-committal) answer I can’t even remember from James.

Such was the tone of most of the evening. Me, trying to guide the conversation towards as many revealing data-points as possible, he, trying to guide the conversation towards as much explicit sexuality as possible. I suppose we were both equally self-serving in our attendance.

As so happens in long, enthusiastic conversations, certain bits and pieces stand out in my mind more than others. In one exchange, I asked about James’ and Donna’s personal sexual proclivities, distinct from their employment. “And if it’s too personal a question,” I added, as I usually do, “just tell me so.” When they both shrugged the suggestion off, I pressed. “So?”

“I mean, yeah, I usually top,” James said simply. “It’s more or less the same.”

“And you, Donna?”

“I’m usually topping.”

“And in your personal encounters?”

“Well, it switches.”

“What do you mean?” I pressed some more, getting a few more vague answers.

Eventually, Donna said, “I mean, I’m dominant in the sense that if I don’t like an edit, I’ll have it done again.”

“You’re dominant about editing?” I asked, unable to hide the bit of incredulity in my tone.

“Yeah, well, when I want something done a certain way at work, that’s how it’s going to be. But I don’t want to choose what to eat. I mean, I don’t want to have to pick it out, I just want it brought to me,” Princess Donna said. When I gave her another quizzical look, she seemed to clarify, “I’m usually dominant on camera, but I’m usually submissive in my personal life.”

I nodded, unsurprised.

In another exchange, interestingly, I did hit on something she deemed TMI. “So unless it’s a faux pas, how old are you?”

“25,” James said, answering first. As before, I turned to Donna next.

“I don’t talk about my age on camera,” she said. I gave her another quizzical look, so she elaborated, “There’s a camera in the corner there. We’re on The Upper Floor. I don’t know if they’ve got the sound turned on, but there’s always a camera on.”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly noticing the camera above the dresser full of liqueur in the corner. The little green-yellow light was unmistakable, once you knew where to look. I waved, “Hi, livestream.” (And, purely as an aside, if this is a 24/7 free cam that sometimes includes live porn sets, is it legal for it not to require an age verification like the rest of Kink, Inc.’s sites?)

Near the end of the evening, Donna turned the questioning on me. “So what do you like?” she asked.

“Me?”

She nodded. I waited a while. James took a sip of his drink. I waited some more, thinking about what to say.

“I run a website called MaleSubmissionArt.com,” I started. “Have you seen it?” Everyone listening shook their heads. “I’ll give you a card,” I said. Then I continued, “It’s a photo blog where I feature images of male or other male-identified people in submissive circumstances.” I spoke slowly and, to my mind, deliberately. I wanted to pay as much attention to the reactions I was getting as to the words I was choosing to use. “I identify as a submissive man, and the blog showcases masculine submission, that is, pictures of men or, again, people who identify as men, which challenge the stereotypical and prevalent iconography of submissive men as weak.”

For a moment, everyone was quiet. “Are you in any of the pictures?” James finally asked.

“Some.” I explained, “It’s crowd-sourced, and some readers did suggest images of me, and, frankly, there just isn’t much imagery that’s actually of submissive men on the Internet. Even ‘fem-dom’ imagery mostly shows the dominant woman, not the submissive man—certainly not the submissive man as someone sexy.”

“But is that how you like to play?” Donna asked again and, again, I took a few moments to respond.

“So imagine,” James prompted in the interim, “you have the whole Armory to yourself and anyone you wanted to play with. What would you do?”

“I like….” I started, then stopped. “I’d probably….” I again stopped short, unsure how I wanted to answer. “I’d like to play in a way that challenges these rigid gender roles, that subverts people’s ideas of what or how I have to do something, or wear something, just because I’m a guy, or because you’re a girl, or whatever preconceived idea they can’t get away from.” I was no longer watching the room, I was watching my own mind. But I quickly snapped myself out of my unintentional reverie and refocused on the conversation. “That’s what I’d do here. That’d turn me on.”

I surveyed the group. Donna had pursed her lips, possibly in thought, and nodded once, slowly. James looked into his diminishing drink. Our interloper stared blankly at me. I got the feeling he didn’t understand half the words I used, far less the meaning of the message.

I pulled out my business cards, yanked my pen out from behind my ear, and wrote “MaleSubmissionArt.com” on one side, then “maybemaimed.com/cv” on the other. I handed one to James and repeated the process for Donna and the interloper. “I’d love to hear what you think. Feel free to contact me anytime,” I said.

Looking around, I noticed this conversation had apparently drawn the attention of the remainder of The Upper Floor’s guests. It was late, and there were only a few people left: besides our hosts Terry and John, there was a shorter man wearing glasses and a suit who had a drink in one hand and his arm around a woman’s waist across from me, and another woman in a white top with blond hair to my left. As the young interloper took the mention of my “photo blog” to discuss “porn shoots” and how he can get in one, I avoided rolling my eyes by turning to the woman at my left.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Shannon,” she said.³

“Mine’s May,” I said. “So what do you do?”

“Like, for work?” she asked. I nodded. “I’m a model.” Then she quickly added, “But I don’t do video.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“It’s a bad deal.”

“You mean, for you, as the model?” I asked. She nodded. “Why? Because, like, you don’t get royalties or stuff?”

Shannon nodded again. “When I’m old and can no longer sell what nature gave me,” she explained, cupping her own breasts for a moment, “I’m not going to be making any money off my past modeling.” Then she talked about some of what’s common knowledge among industry performers: that a model typically signs away all their rights to an image when they are paid—there are no royalties or residuals. It’s part of the standard legal release, all in the fine print. Producers can re-title, re-caption, and resell a model’s image at their whim. As a result, distributors and producers make most of the money from shoots because the revenue is mostly passive income, and none of that goes to the model.

Back in 2005, about 40 Suicide Girls models quit in protest in a controversy over similar issues. For instance, one model’s angry note complains that Suicide Girls was “really just feeding content for other websites SG provides for” and, elsewhere, claims of royalty promises that never materialized were widely publicized.⁴ On Kink, Inc.’s model call page, these particulars seem to be hidden behind the unlinked phrase, “a standard model release.” Many who object to these practices get the predictable line: “it’s industry standard; it’s just business.”

Shannon and I spoke briefly about copyright, MaleSubmissionArt.com’s philosophy on the matter, and my own views on it more generally. I got the sense of her as a thoughtful, cautious, and refreshingly willful woman. She spoke of aspirations, or at least interests, in business and my impression was that she seemed frustrated by the corporatism plaguing the industry.

Before long, John, who I heard shortly before announce to the table that he was “the only exec left in the building,” leaned back in his chair and threw his ankle onto his knee. He stared at me, catching my eye, so I stared back. Eventually, he said, “Are you gonna take back all that awful shit you said about us?”

“No way,” I answered. I surprised even myself at the speed and certainty with which I said it, having to stop myself from adding “in hell” to the end of my remark. No way in hell indeed, I thought to myself, especially not after tonight. Before tonight, all I had was hearsay and my own intuition, but now I am a witness, having firsthand knowledge of the kinds of conversations and views this company’s employees and visitors hold. I hated Kink, Inc. by my own standards, everyone knows that, but now I have reason to hate this company by the outrageously restricting standards of my critics and your supporters. So no way in hell will I “take back” what I said.

There was an awkward pause.

“We’re not bad people,” John said, never dropping the oily smile only a powerful executive can hold for that long.

“I never said you were,” I told him. John finally dropped his smile, replacing it with an intimidating look. “Companies aren’t people, John,” I maintained.

“I think they are,” I heard him say. Part of me can’t believe he said that, doesn’t want to. I hope I misheard, but it is what I heard. It shocked me.

There was another awkward pause. I knew it was late—far later than I had thought I’d be allowed to stay. John stood, and so did I. I left my cup of tequila on the table, still largely untouched.

“Everything that happens at this company,” John said, “is on me.”

“I doubt that,” I replied, “but it’s good to know.”

“No, it’s on me,” he repeated. John had stepped around his chair and was clutching its back. I suddenly noticed the adrenaline coursing through my veins. My heartbeat was thumping in my ears and my eyes instinctively monitored John’s shoulders instead of his face. To say I felt physically threatened would be an overstatement, but to say I felt unsafe would not.

“You can be sure I’ll remember you said that,” I told him. “You’ve got business cards, right?” I asked as he started towards me.

“Absolutely.” He pulled one out and handed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said.

I turned to James and Princess Donna. “It was nice to meet y’all,” I said, “and—I gave you my card, right?—let me know if you’d like to do coffee or something.” They each gave me a (predictably non-committal) little nod.

“We’re not bad people here,” John repeated as I turned back towards him.

“I believe you.” I was flipping his business card over in my hands.

When I looked up again—and I had to literally look up—his oily smile was back. “We should do dinner sometime,” he said as he dropped a heavy hand on my shoulder.

“Totally,” I replied. Our eyes locked. If I wasn’t feeling so adversarial, I might have called it an intimate moment. “I can find my way out.”

John returned his hand to his side and I turned to leave. I pulled out my iPod touch and started typing notes to myself as fast as I could on the little keyboard. As I approached The Upper Floor’s exit, I looked over my shoulder and saw John looking back at me for as long as we were in one another’s line of sight. He was no longer smiling.

In the lobby, I made a final introduction to the new guard on duty at the front desk. “Sorry, this is a hi-bye moment,” I said to him. He smiled back at me and as I turned to leave I saw the creepy interloper near the doorway staring at the glowing rectangle of his smartphone.

I walked to his side and loudly proclaimed, “Well! That was interesting!”

“Yeah!” he agreed.

“What was the most interesting part for you?” I asked, seizing the opportunity to grill him one-on-one.

“Oh, just the whole thing,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Oh, the business, the way the shoots are done….” He trailed off, no longer looking at me.

I think he was fantasizing, so I tried to recenter his attention, “Think women ever watch this stuff?” He shook his head. “Why not?” I asked.

“Oh, because, men have needs on a carnal and physical level, and women have needs on an emotional and social level,” he told me.

“Wow,” I said, dumbfounded. “Men have needs on a carnal and physical level…?” I repeated back to him. iPod in hand, I started typing his remarks verbatim, and I told him I was doing so. “That’s amazing. Hang on, let me write this down.”

“Don’t tell me this is news to you,” he said.

“Oh, it’s not news,” I responded. “I just haven’t ever heard someone…,” I paused for a moment, thinking how to phrase what I wanted to say in a way that wouldn’t be totally disingenuous and would keep him talking, “…articulate this so succinctly before. So, how’d you put it?”

He started over, and I typed up every word on the spot: “Men have needs on a carnal and physical level, and women have needs on an emotional and social level. This is true in every culture and every society of every country in the world. It’s only when we realize this that we’ll bridge the gender gap. If you look at it, porn films, whether gay or straight, have no emotional or social value other than to be outside the norm. You can’t take them to a film festival. Adult films don’t have that [value] for women. This is true whether it’s for gay or straight women.”

“Wow,” I said when he finished. “Just…wow. Thank you so much for saying it that way.”

“Of course,” he said, looking rather pleased with himself.

We were on the sidewalk outside The Armory. He was headed in the opposite direction from me, so I thanked him for his time and I gave him my card. He apologized for running out of his own, to which I told him not to worry. Then I waved to him, turned, and started walking home.

Reflections on my Interactions

I’ve been trying to make sense of my feelings from that evening for weeks now. Many of my reflections are still a jumbled mess of unmitigated anger.

As with my would-be capital-R Relationship with the “metal boy” that never “really” was, my time at the Armory was merely the tip of an iceberg I may never have direct access to again. But I feel strongly that my night there, like my short-circuited feelings for the “metal boy,” confirmed something I’d suspected for a long time: there is an unparalleled ignorance among key decision makers at the highest levels of Kink, Inc., and this ignorance is dumped like sewage on the inlets of the mainstream and of the BDSM community. The Upper Floor, with its “good digs, free booze, and snacks with no cover” is perhaps the most direct example of exploiting the community; the most privileged sex community members create their own parties, according to their own tastes, while selling that fantasy to the less privileged.

This is a familiar revolving door repeating a pattern modeled elsewhere. The “richest 2% of America” are continually pushing the lie that by not taxing the top, “trickle-down” benefits will be seen among the poor. This lie preys upon bigoted, lower-middle class people; it uses their ignorance to make them believe that, one day, if they vote against their own interests, they can also be rich. But it takes a special breed of ignoramus to look at the actions of billionaires and millionaires and conclude that their attempts to shift even more wealth to their own pockets will somehow expand the circle of privilege to include millions more middle-class workers rather than exclude them. So, too, are most of Kink, Inc.’s customers and fans fooled.

I walked home at a brisk pace, feeling energized and defiant. I wanted to punch walls. I didn’t even notice my balled fists until I had to reach for my apartment keys in my pocket.

I was simultaneously proud of how well I had remained civil, even friendly, and angry about the ease with which I was able to do so. My behavior was far too familiar to me. I had covered up my discontent for the sake of sociability before, but not at The Armory. Swallowing my frustrations at The Armory’s decor, with its statues of bound women, paintings of male dominance, and prosthetic female nudes, is basically the same thing I have to do every damn time I walk into a BDSM playspace.

Most people cannot fathom the relentless cognitive dissonance this causes. It undermines my integrity, makes me unable to live up to my own values of honesty, and imposes a tremendous personal, social, sexual, and emotional toll on me. There is no doubt in my mind that this insidiousness has a detrimental, deeply repressive effect on the sociosexual development of many people—men, women, and genderqueer individuals, too.

That is not to say porn is, itself, detrimental, and I’ve had a hard time articulating this nuance until I researched the Suicide Girls controversy from 2005. In his analysis of that issue, Hugo Schwyzer wrote:

[T]o be a feminist is about more than individual empowerment.  Young women who defend certain niches of the porn industry as woman-friendly must be willing to ask hard questions about who really controls sites like the Suicide Girls.  They also have to be willing to consider not just the impact on the individual models/performers, but on the broader culture. […] Authentic feminism asks us to consider how others might interpret our actions.  Our good intentions are not enough.  We have to be mindful of the broader context, of the repercussions, of everything we do.

I do not believe any employee of Kink, Inc. is, by virtue of their employment, “a bad person,” nor do I believe the stunning ignorance of their fans, consumers, and would-be talent condemns them to such censure. But I do believe most of these people have, at best, not bothered to consider the impact on at least one, and possibly more than one, segment of the broader culture: submissive men. And, frankly, just like any other corporation, I don’t think they care to.

EDITORIAL NOTE: If you would like another, more academic, perspective on how this kind of anti-submissive sexism manifests in “The Scene,” I would strongly encourage you to read Domism: Role Essentialism and Sexism Intersectionality in the BDSM Scene next.

1. Technically, the company’s name is Cybernet Entertainment, LLC. Its California business entity number is 199821910013, retrievable from the Secretary of State’s Business Search page.
2. A noteworthy exception was Barry Ptolemy, whose documentary film about Ray Kurzweil, Transcendent Man, was awesome. I got a free copy of the DVD, which was totally worth it.
3. Note that this name has been changed.
4. Here’s some legalese of a content sharing deal between Suicide Girls and Content Pinup that leaves models out in the cold. A long-abandoned Boycott Suicide Girls blog post on MySpace has literally dozens more links, as does Wikipedia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I deflected, again, with a joke.

[…]

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

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sexploration’s Sex Geek Potluck

Last night, I had the privilege and the honor to be invited by Monika, host of Sexploration with Monika, to participate in a “sex geek potluck” down at the FCC Free Radio outpost. Moreover, I was even given airtime to talk about some of the events I’m participating in throughout March. I had a great time, and I can’t thank Monika and her party co-organizer cohort, Reid Mihalko, enough for the opportunity. :)

I’ve excerpted the segment of my time on the radio below, but you can listen to the whole show for free all this week.

• Audio clip and text transcript (15:39) of Maymay and Monika talking about “Remaking Male Submission,” masculinity, and “femdom” porn. Later in the audio, Maggie joins in and the two of us discuss censorship of sexuality on the Internet.

March Events

In March alone, I’ll be making an appearance at the following events.

March 5^th — BDSM: Kink Isn’t So Scary

The Western Regionals LGBTQIA Conference this year is being hosted by UC Berkeley, and I’m going to be a panelist on the only one of only 2 BDSM-themed sessions at the conference.¹ The panel is called “BDSM: Kink Isn’t So Scary.” (A full conference schedule and workshop listing is also available.) One reason I’m particularly excited is because one of my fellow panelists will be none other than Miss Maggie Mayhem, whom I’ve developed an incredible admiration for over the past few months.

After speaking to the panel facilitators, a UC Berkeley student and an alumn, I’m hopeful that this will be a great chance to humanize BDSM’ers and counter folks who would demonize us. Aside from my niggling objection at the synonymous use of “BDSM” and “Kink” (an objection I’ll surely raise at some point in the panel itself), our panel has been given center-stage in a room with a several-hundred person capacity, stadium seating, and a gigantic projector.

March 6^th — Kink On Tap special with Dr. Staci Newmahr

That weekend, I’ll be interviewing the author of the pathbreaking new book, Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy. Dr. Staci Newmahr is a sexuality researcher who holds a Ph.D. in sociology. The book chronicles her experiences in a public BDSM community and is literally the single best exposition on the topic of SM and its relationship to gender, violence, and interpersonal relationships I have ever read. Like all Kink On Tap shows, we’ll broadcast live at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific on Sunday evening, and you can tune in live to be given a chance to ask Dr. Newmahr questions.

There’s also a FetLife and Facebook event listing for this show because it’s a “special,” and we’ll be putting the news stories aside for now and engaging entirely with Dr. Newmahr’s amazing work. If you’ve ever wanted a chance to ask a BDSM researcher a question about the community, this is your chance. Don’t miss it!

March 19^th — KinkForAll Providence 2

As a fitting climax for Brown University’s Sex Week 2011, the hardworking student organizers at the Brown University Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council (SHEEC) have once again sponsored a KinkForAll event: KinkForAll Providence 2. Like last year’s KinkForAll Providence, this one promises to be spectacular, only even bigger.

SHEEC has reserved two whole floors of Smith-Buonanno Hall at 95 Cushing Street. Yours truly will be bringing in equipment for a live stream, so even if you can’t make it to Providence in March, you’ll be able to watch KFAPVD2 live online, or follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #KFAPVD2. There are FetLife and Facebook KFAPVD2 event listings and you’re encouraged to RSVP there, but please, please, please also remember to sign up on the KFAPVD2 wiki registration table to help out the organizers in a coordinated fashion. (Furthermore, free Wi-Fi at KFAPVD2 is guaranteed only to those who register on the wiki and email the SHEEC folks ahead of time.)

Also, did you notice our nifty KFAPVD2 graphic icons? I love ‘em. ;)

March 21^st — On Dichotomies: Breaking Binaries and Why That’s Empowering

After KFAPVD2 on Saturday at Brown University, I was honored to be invited to lead a seminar called “On Dichotomies: Breaking Binaries and Why That’s Empowering” at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Queer Student Association. Readers following KinkForAll closely will recognize the kernel of the seminar from last year’s event in Providence. The RISD seminar will be a long-form discussion of the same material, featuring a facilitated Q&A after the slideshow.

The QSA set up a Facebook event page for the seminar (and I made a FetLife event listing, too). I’d be thrilled to see some familiar faces from KinkForAll Providence 1 in the audience, but I’m equally excited for the opportunity to hear from people I’ve never spoken with before. Even if you can’t make it to the RISD campus for this event, please share it amongst your friends. :)

March 22^nd — Remaking Male Submission: Confronting Sexism in BDSM

While I’m in Providence, I’ve also been invited by Megan Andelloux to lead a workshop at The Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health. I proposed a workshop called “Remaking Male Submission: Confronting Sexism in BDSM,” which is both personally and professionally challenging for me but which I’m very passionate about. Here’s the description as cross-posted on Male Submission Art:

Oscar Wilde once said, “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” In this interactive seminar and slideshow, we’ll examine the nature of sex and power by exploring common cultural depictions of sexually dominant women, and especially submissive men. Join maymay, a sexually submissive man himself and curator of the crowd-sourced erotic photography blog MaleSubmissionArt.com, to tackle deeply-held beliefs about gender and challenge assumptions about “kinky” sex. Just how prevalent, or lacking, is imagery of submissive men? Further, does the existing imagery really offer an alternative to mainstream sexual stereotyping, or does it actually serve to reify the—pun intended—dominant paradigm of male power? Is the public BDSM subculture a haven of free expression, or simply another cage of rigid gender roles dressed up (often literally) in different clothes?

Naturally, I’ve made Facebook and FetLife event listings for this event, too, and would appreciate your help in spreading the word about this workshop in particular. Since the topic matter here is so close to my heart, I’ve found myself hitting wall after wall of self-doubt, questioning and second-guessing myself time and again. I’m exceptionally nervous about this workshop because I believe that if I get it wrong, I’ll be excommunicated from the BDSM community and no one will care. If I get it right, I may still be excommunicated, but at least I’ll get people thinking. And, surprisingly, I still care about the community, despite my anger at it—a fine line to walk.

March 26^th — Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher

I’ll be leaving Providence the same week I arrive in order to fly to Atlanta, Georgia for the inaugural Atlanta Poly Weekend conference. There, I’ll be leading another all-new workshop called “Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher,” which will focus on practical things laymen (not technical specialists like me) can do to protect their online presence against incidental as well as intentional censorship. The workshop will offer minimal foundational theory using real-life examples to help sex-positive publishers connect the dots between technical issues and their own work. In other words, this is the counterpoint to my warnings to technologists that sexually vocal Internet users are the first—but never the last—casualty of Internet censorship.

(As an aside, I am still looking to share my hotel room with someone the night of Sunday, March 27^th. If you’re going to be participating in the Atlanta Poly Weekend conference, or know someone who is, and you’re in need of a hotel room for the evening, please email me or cross-post my request for a roommate to your favorite Atlanta-area local polyamory mailing list on my behalf. I can hardly afford this travel right now so splitting the costs of a hotel stay is welcome. I don’t snore or anything. Promise.)

Future public speaking and activism opportunities

One of the reasons this is possible is because I’ve started to get approached by university professors, campus student groups, community organization programming committees, and others who are seeking public speakers, guest lecturers, or workshop facilitators to fill their calendar. I’m immensely flattered by all the recent offers and I regret that I haven’t the funds to fly everywhere I’ve been invited. However, the invitations are encouraging and given the opportunity to continue jet-setting around the country to nurture sex-positivity and sexual freedom, I’m going to do it.

On that note, if you or your organization has an interest in booking me for an engagement, please get in touch! If you think someone you know might be interested, please send them to my “Things I’ve done” page so they can become familiar with me and my work quickly and easily.

My life is only as good as my connections to the good people in it. Please help me fill my life with goodness, and help me help fill others’ lives with the same. :)

1. Thanks for pointing out the other, Nikola.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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