It’s interesting to note that I was already “the sex blogger that didn’t blog about sex,” at least relatively infrequently and tamely. Nevertheless, I’m even more widely read now (after stopping to talk about the practice of sex) than I ever was before. More interesting, however, is that I’m still asked questions about my personal sexual practices, and asked questions about sex in general, regardless of how much I do or do not talk about what I like to do in the sack.

Recently, I got one such question in an email from someone calling themselves Charybdis:

I like pain, bondage and most of the BDSM culture, but one problem I keep bumping into is that I cannot find a partner who accepts that I do not need, or really want, penetrative vaginal sex. I find a far more intense pleasure moment in other areas of sexual play.

I know what I like and want. But I keep bumping into that wall within the culture that I am supposed to really enjoy his dick inside of me. Will I ever find anyone who understands? Is it alright to be me, as I am, and still be the dominant personality I am, yet not want to be fucked in my vagina?

I have read some (ok, a lot) of your posts, and you seem to really GET how to explain things. I just haven’t read anything where you spoke to this.

—Charybdis

Both the tone and the content of Charybdis’s email resonated with me. It’s frustrating at best and downright depressing at worst to continually feel barred from a full and happy expression of my sexuality thanks to other people’s failure to acknowledge my desires. When Charybdis says they “keep bumping into that wall within the culture,” what I hear is, “I’m frustrated by the systemic suppression of the validity of my sexual desires simply because they do not conform to cultural norms.”

It’s worth calling out the fact that the “culture” being spoken of is, itself, a subculture (the BDSM subculture, specifically), and yet even here, far from the mainstream, there’s cultural pressure to conform to some idealized standard of behavior and desire. Regardless of whether such conformity is required by the mainstream or a subculture, the root of the problem is the same: unquestioned values coupled with disrespect of diversity. While I see nothing inherently wrong with communally-defined idealized standards, I see a lot of things wrong with the ways those standards are perpetuated, ways that needlessly harm people like Charybdis and myself.

So, first, Charybdis, know this: Yes, it is alright to be you, as you are, and still be the dominant personality you are, yet not want to be fucked in your vagina. Second, know that you can fuck with your vagina as easily as you can be fucked in it. And finally, know that while you may not have found people who understand this or who don’t value intercourse highly yet, such people are out there, and they are probably looking for you, too.

Intercourse, which is the word I use to distinguish penis-in-vagina sex from the many other and equally enjoyable kinds of sex I have with partners, is one of the things that’s changed a lot for me over the past two years. Eileen and I did have intercourse, but extremely infrequently by anyone’s measure—maybe once every few months or so? Anyway, it was certainly rare enough that it was especially noteworthy when we did have intercourse. By contrast, intercourse is the sex that Emma and I have most often—intercourse is at least part of almost all of our sexual encounters.

Although I haven’t written much about intercourse specifically, which speaks more to how unimportant the fact of the act is than my interest or lack thereof in it, Eileen has, and I’d encourage you to read through her archives on the subject of sex:

ladies and gentlemen, I am a supposedly “sexually liberated” woman who does not enjoy the act of sexual intercourse. […] I’ve been there, in many different ways with a moderate handful of partners. And I’m here to tell you, it just doesn’t do it for me.

[…]

I would rather curl up in bed with my Hitachi Magic Wand than my achingly eager boyfriend. I’d say it’s a very good thing I ended up with a boy with a fetish for pleasure control.

I don’t doubt that it’s my “fetish for pleasure control” that shaped my rather existential values regarding sexual acts; the act of intercourse isn’t hot for me without a certain intentionality and since that intention can be achieved regardless of a specific sex act, I have no worldly reason to find having my cock inside a partner’s cunt particularly important. Sure, it feels wonderful, but so do many other things. I kink much harder on being sexually controlled in novel and psychologically intimate ways than I do on simple intercourse.

Indeed, the only strong motivation I can remember feeling for intercourse is derived from my partner’s desire for the act itself. Enjoying particular sex acts for the acts themselves very often boils down to sexual compersion, for me. Such is undoubtedly the case with Emma.

When Emma and I have intercourse, we do so because she wants that, specifically. So clear is the distinction between her desire for the act and my desire to pleasure her through the act that intercourse, for us, often revolves around an explicit and intentional challenge in which my sole purpose is to pleasure her with my cock (often to the exclusion of my own orgasm, because then the power differential is even more pronounced). During these scenes, which rarely involve restraints or any other traditional symbols of the BDSM subculture, I’m not a man wanting sex but rather a mindful and sophisticated pleasure toy that’s been “turned on” for her use.

While the sex I had with Eileen is stunningly different from the sex I have with Emma, my intentionality has not changed. I was Eileen’s toy. Then (and, happily, now) I was Emma’s. Eileen had her personal motivations. Emma has her own, different set.

When sex is amazing, it is never because of a sublimation of desires on anyone’s part, but rather an alignment of individual self-interest and fulfillment. For many men, intercourse has specific meaning, value, and importance. For me, it doesn’t. I’m no more or less a man than the men who desire intercourse, and neither Eileen, Emma, nor Charybdis is any more or less (presumably) women than other women with different desires than theirs.

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

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

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

Download:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch the full video of the remainder of the panel.

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

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

There are no truths without full and original context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leadership

Feminist Mom begins with a question:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Equality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later, Anonymous commented again and said this:

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

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

As it should.

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

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

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

And y’know what? That’s not so terrible. Here’s why.

The Internet is like a giant game of telephone

While misunderstandings and hurt feelings aren’t fun, they’re not the only thing that can result from a game of telephone. Similarly, while misunderstandings and hurt feelings sadly abound in response to Iranian Cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi’s claim that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes (not to mention Pat Robertson’s equally bigoted claim that gay people cause hurricanes)¹, a lot of real good did come from Boobquake. As Lissy observed:

watching my facebook statuses I noticed something… boobquake worked for a lot of people who I know don’t spend much time thinking about feminism at all. My very capable and hardworking sister Ginger, takes no shit from anyone but would never be described as a feminist activist[…]. But boobquake? She was onto that, spewing on her facebook status about sexist pigs in a way that made me a proud older sister… she listened to me ranting, all that time I thought she wasn’t listening as a teenager she was!

Of course, baring cleavage in the name of women’s liberation is itself controversial. In short order, Boobquake received criticism from feminists who felt “saddened” by this response. A counter-event, categorized as a “Protest” on Facebook named Brainquake, soon sprung into being. What’s most interesting of all, Brainquake creators Negar Mottahedeh and Golbarg Bashi say that they’ve been in touch with Boobquake instigator Jennifer McCreight, and McCreight says she’s been in touch with the Brainquake creators, and that there’s little (if any) animosity between the three of them.

Responding to factional feminism

Nevertheless, while hanging out on Twitter on Sunday, I saw a seemingly endless stream of negativity about Boobquake from Brainquake supporters. It was being described as “anti-feminist,” and while I personally don’t find boobquake that appealing (although it is funny), I found the negativity spewed Jennifer’s way even less appealing. That’s when I decided I’d break the binary and came up with Femquake. As I wrote when I introduced the idea:

Both breasts and brains are good for humanity and deserve our respect. Don’t coerce women into being proud of one over the other, or feeling ashamed of either! YES WE CAN all get along.

[…]

The core ideal is not a woman’s body or her mind, but her humanity. Decrying women who are proud of their bodies is as oppressive as forcing the ones who aren’t to cover them up. Hailing intellectualism over physical value is as insensitively demonizing as nonconsensual sexualization.

It’s time for women, men, and everyone else to empower one another to live the lives we want to live, free of coercion and abuse, whether modestly dressed or not.

It’s time for a FEMQUAKE!

Jumping on the “b*quake” bandwagon had its benefits. Within hours, the Femquake Facebook page had hundreds of fans—and an equal number of detractors. It seems that you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. And, statistically speaking, that’s precisely the problem with Boobquake, too, as Phil Plait from Discover Magazine wrote:

there are very few huge quakes, and a lot of little ones. We expect to rack up maybe one quake more powerful than magnitude 8 in a year, but on average we get one in the magnitude 6 – 6.9 range every couple of days somewhere in the world, and one in the 5 – 5.9 range something like three to five times every day. That’s every few hours!

And there’s the weakness in the Boobquake plan. […W]ithout defining the time period, the earthquake size, and the region in advance, this can actually reinforce the cleric’s claims! Given the huge tracts of land involved, no matter when women of the world unveil their decolletage, there is bound to be a magnitude 5 quake within an hour or so of the event, and a mag 6 quake within a day.

Jennifer McCreight, Negar Mottahedeh and Golbarg Bashi, and myself have all received criticism for supporting gender justice in our own ways, and the criticism is as diverse as ever. That’s no surprise, and again, I think it’s actually a beautiful thing. Having this diversity empowers people to choose the form of activism that’s right for them.

And if you don’t see what you like, you can self-empower yourself to go make it.

Feminism is about gender equality, and equality requires self-empowerment

That message of self-empowerment is, in my view, what my response to the factionalism over the “*quake” events is all about: Don’t let ideological feminists shame you into covering yourself up, or pressure you into exposing yourself, I wrote. Your body is YOURS. It is yours to show off however you like, whether physically, intellectually, or otherwise.

On that note, let me share with you some of the criticism I’ve received over Femquake. I think the negativity can be illustrative and can offer a wonderful opportunity to practice empowering positivity. If all this hullaballoo over boobquake has shown me one thing, it’s that we all need to practice assuming good faith and responding to offense nonviolenty.

@Custard_Socks says “fuck off with your titpics”

I followed conversation about #Femquake on Twitter. Here’s what @Custard_Socks had to say:

Femquake? Brains and boobs? My sister’s a flat chested idiot but she’s done damn well in a male dominated job, so fuck off with your titpics

(They said it here.)

I responded:

@Custard_Socks #Femquake is feminist solidarity—the idea is that #sexuality is too often divisive. Why be so negative when we could empower?

In answering honestly (I believe), @Custard_Socks said:

@maymaym From the participants on the Femquake Facebook page, feminism means you can brag about your high IQ & big tits. Solidarity, my arse

@maymaym Boasting is empowerment for the selfish.

(They said it here and here.)

At this point, it occurred to me that there probably wasn’t anything I could say to convince this person of Femquake’s intent. I simply don’t know how else to describe Femquake than the way I did on the Femquake Facebook event page:

On Femquake Day, honor a feminist who inspires compassion among different groups of people and who celebrates the value inherent in the diversity of human sexuality. In other words, HONOR FEMINISTS WHO ROCK YOUR WORLD!

Or, just smile at a stranger. It’s good for them, for you, and for our planet. :)

If honoring feminists who rock my world amounts to “brag[gin]” about their high IQ and big tits, well, fuck, I’m in! If smiling at strangers is “boasting” and “selfish,” fuck it, slap my ass and call me narcissistic! Smiling is healthy, and so is being proud of who you are.

Anyway, taking my own advice, my conversation with @Custard_Socks continued with my reply, which I intended just as genuinely as I believe they intended their earlier reply to me:

@Custard_Socks :) I hope you have a fantastic day today and brighten someone’s day. It’d be wonderful if you were able to do that.

But a moment of insight hit me when @Custard_Socks answered back with, @maymaym Are you saying I’m more than likely not capable of that?

“Oh,” I thought to myself, “is that the concern?” Does @Custard_Socks feel so disempowered to bring joy to others that they are so ready to jump to the false belief that others find them incapable of it? Obviously, only @Custard_Socks can answer that, but regardless of this person’s situation, it occurred to me that countless people probably do feel exactly that.

Maybe some of what the knee-jerk negativity in feminist debates needs is someone to say, “Hey, I support you, and I think you can bring this world joy!” (You can read the rest of my conversation with @Custard_Socks here, here, and here.)

Melliferax says, “someone else who is ostensibly on the same side has to go off whining about it? Grumble.”

Femquake got blogged about right alongside Boobquake and Brainquake, just as I’d hoped it would. Of course, not everyone was so enthused. In a comment on one such blog post, Melliferax said:

Femquake… had a very quick look and it just seems like the usual call for equality? How’s that different from, y’know, feminism or good ole humanism? Why is it that every time someone comes up with an idea, like arresting the pope or showing some cleavage, someone else who is ostensibly on the same side has to go off whining about it? Grumble.

Femquake was born out of my unhappiness with the unhappiness many Brainquakers felt towards Boobquakers. So yeah, I guess you could say I was “whining about it.” But is that so terrible?

I mean, if a “call for equality” can come from unhappiness, is saying that the people who advocate for that equality are “whining” really going to help matters? I don’t think so, but I’m not going to belittle you for thinking differently.

If calls for equality stem from whining, then maybe what we need are more people whining! What I think we don’t need, however, is negativity directed at calls for equality. Since you get to choose how you respond, why choose something negative when you could choose something positively empowering?

Millerax says that Femquake “just seems like the usual call for equality,” but as the billions of female-assigned, intersex, transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual, kinky, and queer people will attest, calls for equality is anything but “usual” in far too many parts of the world. I think the absence of more calls to equality in places like Iran is seriously whacked, yo. Don’t you?

Anonymous says, “awesome. a man is leading the femquake charge. […I]t means a little less to me now.”

As I’ve been saying for years, one of the beautiful things about the Internet is that it enables us to let our ideas, words, and actions speak for themselves, without judgements based on age, race, gender, or other characteristics. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a insert-your-feared-identity-here. However, identity really matters to some people.

In a comment on Feminist Mom in Montreal’s Femquake blog post, someone who prefers to remain anonymous said:

awesome. a man is leading the femquake charge. That’s all great and lovely, but I guess I was hoping that it was a woman. If that makes me sexist, well, I guess maybe I am.

Not gonna lie, it means a little less to me now.

The point is still there and the point is a good one, but meh…some dude on the internet leading the charge on us uniting our boobs and our brains is just, IDK, ironic.

Thanks for the help, though.

First, Anonymous, you’re very welcome! :D I’m glad to help bring about a world where gender justice is a reality!

That being said, I have to wonder why my being a man means that Femquake loses some measure of respect in your eyes. As a man, I know that it’s very difficult for men—including myself, at times—to stand up for the rights of women. Y’see, I could choose not to. I could go about my life content in the knowledge that because no one questions me when I check “M” when replying to Facebook’s “Gender” question,² I have privileges that someone who checks “F” may never have.

And y’know what? That’s a pretty sweet deal for me and the other “M”‘s, and a pretty crappy one for all the “F”‘s.

That’s why it’s absolutely baffling to me that when men stand up for gender equality, it somehow means less than when women do it. The reality is that no matter who is standing up for gender equality, it means the same thing: that we are all working towards the same goal of equality and opportunity for all souls on this planet, regardless of what body those souls inhabit.

So, while Anonymous may find it “ironic” that a man like me came up with Femquake, I find it equally ironic that someone who wants to support gender equality would devalue an effort to support gender justice due to the gender of that effort’s founder.

Strengthen love, not shame

There are, of course, plenty of other negative and positive responses to Femquake, and I’m thrilled to see that the Femquake page is still getting fans. After all, communication is inherently imperfect because otherwise we wouldn’t need it. And so I think, in the end, all this diversity is beautiful—it’s a reflection of the diversity inherent in all of you!

Ultimately, regardless of whether someone supports me or tries to put me down, I’m going to work on just being happy. I want to spread joy in the world. :) I know it can be hard, and I struggle to smile sometimes but, with your help, I’m learning how.

Thank you for all the criticism, the support, the encouragement, the denigration, and responses. Thank you for keeping the conversation going, and for talking to one another, and to me! Thank you for turning a sexist comment by an Iranian religious leader and a boob joke by a young feminist into an opportunity to promote peace and happiness and understanding and unity and self-empowerment and beauty and intelligence!

Now go and enjoy life, because working towards bringing pleasure and joy and equality and opportunity to everyone—everyone—is what feminism is all about!

1. I think Pat is wrong about the whole hurricane thing. I think Teh Gehys actually cause volcanos. Don’t you remember the recent Icelandic volcano that halted air travel in Europe? I mean, those Frenchies are all sexual deviants! I say we need a #Gaycano experiment! Go, Internet, go!
2. Facebook really ought to change that label to “Sex,” not “Gender,” since those two words are not actually interchangeable. See also: Gender and Technology.

I raise my arm, swing the whip, and out comes a force so sure and strong that it breaks the sound barrier. It’s hard to forget walking in the middle of New York City’s Fifth Avenue, surrounded with 25 to 50 feet of empty street on all sides, cracking whips above my head so loudly that the sonic booms bounce off the skyscrapers and echo back at me. It’s one of the most self-empowering memories I have: “I am not afraid to be seen here,” I thought to myself.

In both parades, I was one of the few bottoms who marched, wielding a whip. In both parades, I walked shirtless, showing marks acquired in scenes the night before. I turned heads.

I don’t show, or even get, marks like the ones I had during NYC Pride 2005 and 2007 often but, having had them, and having the opportunity to march with the whip-cracking contingent, I thought it important to be visibly proud of them.

In New York City, the Pride Parade on Fifth Avenue crosses directly in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It’s there where most protesters—and a number of photographers—choose to gather. Both years when I marched, the protesters were a small and rather calm-looking group of people who seemed almost more interested in getting a front row seat for the parade than in, y’know, protesting anything. Perhaps that was because it was, after all, New York City.

But I have heard stories, both on the news and from friends, of less civil behavior.

According to the 2008 Hate Crimes Survey conducted by Human Rights First, an international human rights watchdog group:

Available data indicates that violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity bias is a significant portion of violent hate crimes overall and are characterized by levels of physical violence that in some cases exceed those present in other hate crimes.

According to the 2003 World Legal Survey conducted by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), consensual homosexual sex was illegal in 77 countries. Public Agenda, a US-based, non-partisan, non-profit research organization, republished this data in early 2009, but a few months later the ILGA released a report entitled 2009 Report on State-sponsored Homophobia that lists 80 countries where homosexuality is illegal, of which 5 list any homosexual act (presumably regardless of consent) as punishable by the death penalty.

If the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda is passed, that number will go up. Again.

I am supremely fortunate to live in America today. Whether because of my self-identification as a bisexual man, a sadomasochist, an atheist, or any number of other possible labels, if I lived in any of dozens upon dozens of other countries around the world, I would be a criminal merely for existing.

I am not a criminal. But, even in America, I am a target. Why? I think it is because I have marched in two Pride Parades and I have come away from them with this conviction: I am not afraid to be seen here. Neither the choice I made, nor the repercussions of it, have been easy for me.

As many of you are no doubt aware by now, over the course of the last week I have been shocked into reluctant action by vicious insinuations of criminal behavior written by Donna M. Hughes and Margaret (Barber) Brooks likening me and the work I do supporting community-based sexuality education initiatives like KinkForAll to organized human trafficking and child sex slavery. The awful, frightening (and no doubt frightened) ignorance that these two university professors displayed shook me to my very core.

I have had to seek legal counsel because Donna M. Hughes’ and Margaret Brooks’ carefully crafted “bulletin,” a 6-page personal assault laced with corrosive language, has already incited several bloggers to name me a pedophile and sexual predator, which are unquestionably defamatory statements. I am continuing to explore all possible legal avenues for defense and protection, both for myself and those I work with. I want to thank everyone who has written to me, whether privately or publicly—but especially publicly—offering support, encouragement, and resources.

Many of you have described admiration for my rational responses to the unwarranted attacks by Donna M. Hughes, Margaret Brooks, and their mob. I want you to know that I am not totally unafraid or magically equanimous—how could I be? I feel terrorized by these people! That’s why I had no choice but respond the way I did: any action other than an attempt to allay fear, both my own and theirs, would cause more fear. And I will not succumb to the same sorts of fears plaguing those who attack me.

No matter what the outcome of these current tribulations, I am not going to be the hero in this story. You are. I have always and will continue to always stand for the rights of all individuals to live free, sexually knowledgeable and well-educated lives. What I am writing today is not unique or surprising. It is expected of me, and it is old news. Heroes do not make old, predictable news.

What is new, what is unexpected, what is heroic is how you will respond. What will you do in your day-to-day lives to make the world a place where all people, regardless of race, creed, or age, are empowered to stand up against abuse, intimidation, and coercion? Will you speak up against the next street harasser you see shouting lewdly at women walking by him? Will you break the cycle of corporal punishment by talking to an aunt who wants to hit her child? Will you stand beside your gay, trans, intersex, or genderqueer friends when others ridicule them? Will you elect government officials who care more about your physical health in this life than your moral well-being in the afterlife?

(via sushiesque.com)

Those are heroic acts you can take and all of them are deviant; heroism is not the adherence to conformity but the courage to deviate from it; unity cannot be achieved through homogeneity but diversity; bravery is not the absence of fear but the ability to stand tall in spite of it, for what the fear-mongers and the fearful surely know is that fear and intimidation have the power to halt action. When people like Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks use fear tactics to incite moral panic, whether it was about interracial marriage in the 1930′s, about homophobia in the 1950′s, or about sex education more recently, ask yourself if they are really fighting to change the status quo, or fighting to keep it.

Today, I need to stand taller, to speak louder, and be stronger than ever before. I am not afraid to be different, to showcase our differences, or to support others’ rights to be, to live, to learn, and to love differently from me. By being visibly proud of my differences I am fighting against stigmas that people would try to intimidate me with.

I thank Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks for showing me the importance of standing up and loudly proclaiming who I am: a middle-school drop out, a diagnosed bipolar person, a sexually submissive man, and a sexuality education community tool-builder. Ladies, you may think these things discredit me but you are wrong. They give me a perspective you cannot have. I can only hope that you find it in yourself to respect it in me.

In the words of The Book of Blue:

[E]veryone has a world where they express the depth of their self, whether it’s in their mind or they can also bring their body. Many people wonder or fear if their secret world is too strange or embarrassing to reveal. […] I am reaching right for the part of you that knows that you need to acknowledge and reveal yourself. I am here to help you create a space in your mind where you know that it’s safe to have this kind of freedom with yourself, and to share yourself and what you’re feeling with a loving witness. Not just safe but inevitable.

With that in mind, Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks, my invitation to a discussion still stands. Show me that you are not afraid. Show me that you care about encouraging the kind of education the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says we all have a fundamental human right to: education that promotes peace and understanding among all people.

Be the unexpected heroes our children and our children’s children need you to be. Yes you can.

Please believe in me. I believe in you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Marie,

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

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

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

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

First, you wrote:

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

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

Second, you wrote:

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

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

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

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

Third, you wrote:

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

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

Fourth, you wrote:

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

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

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

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

On a personal note:

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

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

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

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

Cheers,
-["maymay"] :)

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

["maymay"],

Thank you for your reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, sir, thank you for your comment.

My reply to Marie’s comment follows:

Hi Marie,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Brooks

Donna M. Hughes

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

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

It’s no surprise, really. I’ve gone through an incredible transformation from a disgruntled youth to what I believe I can safely describe as a sexual freedom community organizer this year. Merging my passions for technology and sexual freedom has meant I’ve become a spokesperson for the intersection of tech and sex, founding KinkForAll put me at odds with some of the more traditional sexuality community leaders, and the louder I get and the more I do with media projects like Kink On Tap and SexEdEverywhere, the more obvious a target for opposition I become.

This change has provided some invaluable experiences from which I’ve learned a lot. However, not all of these lessons have been fun, or easy. Some of them, like what happened a few weeks ago, have been downright enraging, deeply hurtful, and very scary.

Now, I could get upset about attacks on me and my work (and I did, especially since the nastiest ones came from people who call themselves educators), but I could also see opposition to what I do as a sort of unsolicited advice. Detractors can help me figure out what more I need to do to make the world a better place. Some of the people holding uninformed beliefs that I’m recklessly endangering people’s lives rather than improving them are the very ones I need to find a way to reach more than any other group.

And that brings me to my question for all of you:

In your attempts to share knowledge, how do you deal with certified educators who try to prevent you from speaking up, who want to silence your voice? What do you do if you disagree with them about what education itself means?

This is the question that’s been challenging me for weeks now. Despite mulling it over in my head, I haven’t come up with answers. I have, however, learned some lessons about what to do in tough situations that I’d like to share with you now. In so doing, I hope to start a conversation with you and the wider education community about educators and education itself, particularly education about controversial topics like sex, because I think this is a conversation that needs to be had and from which I can learn a lot.

1. Don’t let “stop energy” distract you from your work.

Time and again, the first thing I hear when I propose an idea to a group of people is the word “no.” It’s like an omnipotent monster, always there everywhere you go, never backing down. This monster can also come in the form of “can’t,” “don’t,” and perhaps most tellingly, “shouldn’t.” All of these are the same: a form of opposition that Dave Winer calls stop energy. Dave describes stop energy as reasons why [one] can’t or shouldn’t be allowed to do what [one] proposes.

Sometimes stop energy is unintentional, coming from friends who want to help you avoid pitfalls but fail to express themselves supportively. Other times, stop energy can be dangerous, coming from people who will actively try to prevent you from accomplishing your goal. In my experience, these are often people who feel threatened by you or your work because you’re changing the status quo in some way. These are also the people most likely to viciously criticize and undermine you in any number of subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

As I mentioned in my KinkForAll Providence presentation,

For those that don’t know, when Sara Eileen and I co-founded KinkForAll, we took some very heavy criticism from people who believed that the essentially open and public nature of KinkForAll events were “recklessly endangering” participants, that we would be “outing” people. I believe this criticism was spawned from a belief in [a] false dichotomy: that to be public is to be out, that in order to have adequate privacy, people of sexuality minorities must be closeted.

Most often, however, stop energy can simply be distracting. The larger the group you’re speaking to, the more distracting stop energy you’re likely to encounter. Like waves in a giant pool, I encountered torrents of this form of stop energy when I started MaleSubmissionArt.com from people who were disapproving of my use of imagery I didn’t know the source of, who questioned the need for the site’s existence, or who simply didn’t understand my goal. If I had taken the time to respond to most of these people, the site would never have survived because all my time would’ve been sucked up by the distraction they created.

Stop energy is deadly to projects and ideas. Regardless of whether it is active opposition or simply a passive decoy, I learned that you must absolutely never let negative attention keep you from doing your work. You must constantly, consistently, relentlessly keep pushing forward. Stop for just a moment before you reach your tipping point—a kind of stop energy escape velocity, if you will—and your success is in question.

2. Win-win is more possible than you think; never settle.

I don’t believe in compromise, in splitting the difference, or in zero-sum games. That doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore people or force my will on others. What it means is that given two diametrically opposed resolutions to a problem, I always seek a third option.

Sometimes finding win-win situations involves changing the rules of the game. Despite what many people might say, changing the rules of the game is okay because if you prioritize a system’s bureaucracy over the value it was (ostensibly) intended to provide, you’ll lock yourself into a cage called stagnation. Giving in to a compromise is the antithesis of win-win situations (scenarios in which everyone benefits and no one’s desires are sacrificed) and, I promise you, win-win situations are more possible than you think.

Case in point, despite the stop energy people threw at me for MaleSubmissionArt.com about its use of images, many artists whose work I feature are very happy to have their photographs displayed on the site. What I find horribly ignorant is not the desire of some artists to protect their work by restricting who can republish it, but the notion that because they don’t want to participate in the site, they have some right to prevent me from involving others. That’s the kind of approach guaranteed to preclude even the possibility of a win-win situation from emerging, and that’s just bad for everyone.

For a more personal example, in the two months or so since I quit my day job, I was able to find a new job that takes up less of my time. When I quit my day job, I wrote:

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.

If I was ever willing to compromise the full realization of my dreams, I would never have been able to make the opportunities I have now.

3. Engage opponents in constructive dialogue.

Sadly, despite your best intentions, some people are just going to dig their heels in and fight against everything you do. At KinkForAll Providence, Megan Andelloux gave a talk called Sex Panic in Pawtucket where she discussed her experience dealing with just such a situation:

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

(Emphasis mine. Megan’s struggle eventually made its way onto Wikipedia, where we can learn that the University of Rhode Island professor crusading against sex-positive culture and those in it is none other than character assassin and right-wing wingnut Donna M. Hughes. For more information about Donna M. Hughes’ unabashed smear campaigns, see my later post.)

Megan’s talk is well worth listening to, but what I found most interesting about it is that she had to fight back against educators who were trying to stop efforts to educate. This is interesting because the slanderous attacks against me have often come from educators, too.

In one case, the person in question runs classes about various sexuality topics and accused me of attempting to get KinkForAll attendees registered as sex offenders because of my insistence that the unconferences place no age-based restriction on who can participate. In another case, the person is a professor at a university (much like Megan’s experience), who tried to stop KinkForAll events by trying to build a case to show how I’m supposedly intentionally crafting dangerous environments and luring young people there, among other things.

I think these people are afraid. So afraid, I think, that they let paranoia overcome their reason. I think educators more than any other group should be people who empower, not censor. As I said during my presentation at KinkForAll Washington DC:

If you truly want to protect our children from sexual abuse, then education is far and away the best protection you can give them. And yet, sadly, even in otherwise unbiased communities, many people are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that young people might want to participate, almost always citing fears that access to sexuality information could be traumatic. Tragically, projecting such sexual paranoia onto young people is actually killing many of them.

[…]

Sadly, because of the social constructions of power with which sex and age are so inextricably intertwined, the people in power—the adults—often choose censorship to restrict the availability of sexuality information to young people instead of education, all under the guise of protection. But censorship and oppressive information restrictions are not protection, only education is.

In these and other instances, attempting to engage constructively with these individuals has proven enormously difficult. In one case, I was forced to disengage when I realized that the discussion itself was a stalling tactic; the person in question was determined to turn any engagement whatsoever into pure stop energy. In other cases, people refused to engage me directly and instead went behind my back in order to sabotage my work and the work of my collaborators by making outrageous and slanderous claims about us and our intentions.

Thankfully, these sorts of people have a fundamental weakness: they don’t listen. In one case, the person in question actually used my own words about education’s importance (the ones I quoted above, in fact) in order to attempt to convince others that I was trying not to educate. Nonsensical, I know, but that’s how twisted these people’s perceptions of me are.

After KinkForAll Washington DC was ousted from our original venue, we were concerned that the negative press it got would mean detractors would show up to the unconference itself. We were concerned about the same thing at KinkForAll Providence. That didn’t happen, but what if it did? What could we do?

As part of the public discussion about the concerns, “Chris!” made the suggestion on the KinkForAll mailing list that we could actually invite these people to voice their opinions in the same manner that we are voicing ours: by encouraging them to lead a session at KinkForAll! I think this could be exactly the right move.

This doesn’t merely sound diplomatic and effective as a show of integrity if not actual discussion. (I don’t know if any people who might show up as protesters to a KinkForAll would actually take us up on such an offer.) More than that, I think it would engage the opposition in the very process of constructive conversation they wish to destroy. Because, as I’m beginning to realize more and more, opposition is not inherently incorrect, nor is it inherently less informed (although it certainly is less informed relatively often).

Opposition is just that: difference. And difference is required for the very thing I want to promote: diversity. Because diversity is unity.

What opposition doesn’t have to be is violent, restrictive, or oppressive. It doesn’t have to impinge on anyone’s rights or freedoms. There can be opposition to a thing and that thing can still harmlessly exist at the same time. That’s the kind of opposition I have to church groups, for instance. I’m certainly not interested in going to any, but I don’t feel any compulsion to stop them from meeting in public places or from letting them pray in those places or in private.

Live and let live—freely, diversely, and without restriction. Again, quoting from my KinkForAll Washington DC presentation:

The more afraid we are, the more arbitrary rules—like age-based oversimplifications—we try to impose on each other. That’s not a solution—that’s unacceptable.

I think people who oppose education oppose humanity itself. Our innate human drive to learn, to know things we didn’t know before, to explore the strange, new worlds of uncertainty is among the most fundamental parts of our existence. It’s the driving force behind the pursuit of happiness. Because if knowledge is power, learning is self-empowerment. In fact, the root of the word educate is educe, a word that means “to draw out potential.”

To me, it seems treasonous to our species that educators like the ones who attacked Megan Andelloux would so unashamedly oppose others’ attempts to educate. Since I can’t fathom why anyone would want to do that, I want to learn more about what these and other people are thinking.

And if you’re someone who’s attacked me in the past, I also invite your comments, especially if you’re one of the people who have previously avoided speaking with me directly. Now’s your chance; I don’t like you right now, but I’m willing to hear you out and learn from you.

What strategies have you used to protect yourself or resolve attacks on your work, your personal life, and your friends from people who are in positions of authority, especially traditional educators? I’m looking forward to hearing about your thoughts and learning from your lessons. Thank you.

Best of all, these conversations didn’t just stay within the four walls of our venue among the participants who attended physically, but it also reached out across the Internet thanks to the KinkForAll Providence live video stream, Twitter conversations, and KFAPVD liveblogs. I think the event’s use of the Internet was truly remarkable this time, because we were able to literally invite anyone in the world to literally watch and see and participate in the discussions that we were having, even if they were unable to be physically present, and even if not everyone agreed with what was being said all the time. Most importantly, as I said in my presentation, since we were able to inspire conversation, everyone stayed within the realm of constructive discourse, and that means we were able to create knowledge, even while individuals may have disagreed on some points.

Below is a video of my presentation. As usual, my presentation is “open source” and Creative Commons licensed. Feel free to download it, use it yourself, or share it with anyone you think might find it valuable. If you do, I would greatly appreciate a link back to this page.

On Dichotomies that (No Longer) Jail Me – KinkForAll Providence from maymay on Vimeo.

Download:

• On Dichotomies that (No Longer) Jail Me keynote presentation as a ZIP archive.
• On Dichotomies that (No Longer) Jail Me keynote presentation as a PDF document.
• On Dichotomies that (No Longer) Jail Me keynote presentation as a text transcript.

I am deeply grateful to Emma for helping me with this presentation and also for taking a leading role in unorganizing KinkForAll Providence (so I didn’t actually do so much this time—and I think that’s great!). Similarly, I’m also grateful to Aida Manduley for getting this event sponsored by SHEEC and for being the primary unorganizer for venue-related issues. There were some, but she handled them beautifully and deserves more praise for more reasons than many of you know. Their persistence, professionalism, thoroughness, and ardent support of sexual freedom, freedom of speech, and students’ rights were what made this event possible, even in the face of some very harsh and alarmist criticism.

With that thanks in mind, here’s the entirety of the presentation I gave at KinkForAll Providence as a text transcript:

First of all, let me just say that this is amazing. Look at all of us here at the fifth KinkForAll unconference in the first year of KinkForAll unconferences! KinkForAll Providence is now the 5th KinkForAll event being held in the 1-year history of the event’s conception. That’s one KinkForAll, in 4 different cities so far, about every 2 months or so for a whole year! Wow!

This event is thanks in large part to the amazing work of two women: Emma Gross, and Aida Manduley, who’s Chair of the Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council here at Brown University. They’re responsible for getting us this space and so much more. Let’s give them a huge hand! (APPLAUSE) I like that name: Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council. Health, education, and empowerment.

I like that name because I think we are actually taught, from a very young age, to see the world in dichotomies, a set of things that are exclusive from an opposing set of things. Dichotomies are necessarily polarizing and, if you’re not careful, they can be paralyzing. Indeed, dichotomies can be DISempowering.

Self-empowerment relies upon our ability to recognize existing dichotomies so that we can utilize them and, if necessary, so that we can break out of them. As Stephen R. Covey, author of the best-selling “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” reminds us:

Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.

Dichotomies are genuinely useful, even necessary. We use them all the time to make sense of the world around us. In fact, dichotomies themselves conveniently come in two mutually exclusive varieties! These are: true dichotomies, and false dichotomies.

Unfortunately, many of the dichotomies that contemporary culture teaches us are one kind are actually the other! Specifically, many dichotomies that you might’ve thought were true are actually false! According to Wiktionary, the Wikipedia-like dictionary, a false dichotomy, just so that we’re all on the same page, is:

A situation in which two alternative points of views are presented as the only options, whereas others are available.

How many of the dichotomies that hegemonic culture says are “true” do you think are actually false? I think the answer might surprise you, and that’s what I’m hoping to do in this presentation: I want to help you recognize these dichotomies. In fact, that’s what the entire founding concept behind KinkForAll is about!

KinkForAll’s tag line is:

A serendipitous, ad-hoc unconference about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life.

This idea, that sexuality can intersect with all the other things in our lives, seems to be something that a lot of people are really uncomfortable with. Their discomfort highlights several dichotomies, one of which is this one:

• Obscene vs Decent

As it happens, this is one of the many false dichotomies that are societally constructed. How do we know that? Easy! Not everyone is uncomfortable with sexuality intersecting certain aspects of their lives, and some people are only uncomfortable with it intersecting with some parts of their lives, but not with others. This variability is the signature of all false dichotomies. Remember that!

Just to drive the point home, let me tell you a short story. Once upon a time (okay, actually in 1966), in a land far, far away (okay, actually in Kristiansand, Norway), lived a man by the name of Jens Bjørnboe. Jens was a painter and a school teacher, but more than anything else, he was a writer. Jens loved to write, and had already published a book of deeply religious poetry, Poems (Dikt, 1951), and a book that dealt with shortcomings of the school system, Jonas (1955).

Then, Jens wrote a fictional novel about an 18 year old girl named “Lillian” who had to masturbate to have orgasms, called Without a Stitch. According to one review:

Without a Stitch begins with a bit of girl-on-girl frolicking with Lillian and Brita [Lillian's classmate], as well as Lillian’s attempts at having fun with the inexperienced Henry. She can’t get the desired satisfaction when Henry fumbles around, and in reaction becomes a real cock-tease — and eventually she realises she needs some professional help. Thank god Brita refers her to Dr. Peterson.

Now, Dr. Peterson is, “a specialist in the orgasm” and Lillian entrusts herself into his care, with all the desired results. Nice. :) The review continues,

Lillian’s problem seems to be that she worries about what her mother and grandmother might think, causing these inhibitions that hold her back. But Dr. Peterson helps her overcome these, and instructs her in his own moral code — which amounts to that all sex is good (and more is apparently better …), as long as no one is hurt or taken advantage of. It takes a lot of daily sessions — during which she’s not allowed to be with any other man — to get the message across, but finally she’s cured.

All right, so: a woman of legal adulthood who was so concerned about what others might think of her that she can’t have orgasms overcomes that fear under the care of a physician who tells her that all sex is good as long as no one is hurt or taken advantage of. Okay, so there’s some lesbian scenes, but also some really strict monogamy. Doesn’t sound so out-there radical to me, really.

Unfortunately for Jens, it did sound radical to the government of Norway, and Bjørnboe suffered an obscenity conviction for publishing the book as pornography. Interestingly, his fictional porn would arguably pale in comparison to the non-fiction writing I’ve published on my own blog—and that I’ve read from countless other bloggers! Obviously then, we are obscene by some standards but not by others. Indeed, obscenity standards vary with time, place, and a host of other things.

More interestingly, perhaps, is the fact that Jens Bjørnboe went on to publish his most well-known work, The History of Bestiality, and as far as I can tell the Norwegian government didn’t care to prosecute him for publishing pornography in that case. Huh.

Jens was a pretty uncompromising man. He once said,

People speak of ‘sexual morality,’ but that is a misleading expression. There is no special morality for sex. No matter what you do with yourself, whether you go to bed with girls or with boys, and no matter what it occurs to you to do with them or with yourself, no moral rule applies to that sphere of activity other than the principles that govern every aspect of life: honesty, courage, common humanity, consideration.

What Jens understood that I think is so valuable is that people who dichotomize consensual sexual activity into obscene and decent acts also tend to approach morality as a dichotomy; they couple obscene with immoral and decent with moral. Indeed, Jens sees that the failure to recognize one false dichotomy actually blurs one’s view of which other dichotomies are true and which are not. On the other hand, when you begin to see the gradations between things you once simplistically believed were absolutes, you empower yourself to break out of all false dichotomies.

Now, before I go any further, it’s important to mention that false dichotomies are not inherently bad things; they can be useful, as I mentioned, and they can be a lot of fun. Case in point, I think dichotomies of power are really fucking sexy! Specifically, I have always loved (and still love) playing—but not being—powerless. That is, I enjoy being sexually submissive.

Trouble is, I’m a man. Yes, I know what you’re thinking: DUH! Thing is, the fact that I’m a man wasn’t always clear to me. In fact, thanks to this really strong tendency that false dichotomies, when we incorrectly believe they are true, have of reinforcing one another, for the longest time I thought I was actually a woman! Yeah! Let me tell you why.

In mainstream Western society, and indeed in most modern cultures, this dichotomy of power–dominance on one hand and submission on the other–reinforces this other, totally unrelated anywhere but in some people’s minds, false dichotomy: the one of gender, with men on one side, and women on the other. And then, as if that weren’t enough, both of those false dichotomies are also strung together like this, so that dominance and manliness is also coupled with activity, while submission and femininity is also coupled with passivity. The trouble with that, for me, was that I like being active and I like being passive in bed!

And then, as if that weren’t enough, I turned 13, and I put a toothbrush in my butt–and I liked it! So now I discovered this other, additional incorrect coupling: penetration is coupled with being active, which, as we’ve already seen is coupled with manliness, which ostensibly makes it dominant. On the other side, being penetrated is coupled with being passive or “receptive,” which, remember, is coupled with womanliness, which makes it ostensibly submissive. So now my 13 year old self is totally fucking confused and has no idea what the fuck I am–man, woman, top, bottom, active partner, passive partner–except that I knew I really liked getting tied up and I really like my toothbrush in my butt.

But wait, there’s more! One year later, my younger brother made friends with this really cute guy in his class and he started coming over to our place and I got a really big crush on him. And that’s when I learned that contemporary culture said, if I was, in fact, a boy, that I was also gay! Yeah, even though I also also masturbated to thoughts of girls! Because apparently, to fit in with contemporary culture, you can’t be bisexual if you’re a man. You’ve gotta be either straight or gay. And even though I was “only” 14, I knew that if you like your toothbrush in your butt, you’re gay!

So, like, oh my god! Could I be a gay boy who liked girls? Was that possible? Was I just…wrong about everything? Fuck, was there something wrong with me? Maybe there was something wrong with these distinctions. Maybe not all of them were true dichotomies. Hmm….

Thankfully, I had (drum roll please) THE INTERNET! Yes, the Internet. I did some searches. I surfed a bunch of sites. I read a lot of porn. I had some more pretty confused orgasms. And then, I found this: The Kinsey Scale.

What was so interesting about the Kinsey scale was that it introduced me to this idea that there were gradations in sexual orientation. That’s when it clicked: I’m probably some kind of bisexual. So, ignoring for a moment the limitations of this concept, I figured that if there were gradations in sexual orientation, maybe there were gradations in a bunch of those other dichotomies.

Of course, it turns out, yes, there are. There’s a big wide world of queer between the poles of heteronormativity, switches enjoy varying consensual sexual power differentials, and even when it comes to anatomical characteristics there are varying degrees of intersexuality that mix male and female. So, long story short, even though I really liked that toothbrush, I eventually upgraded to a strap-on because I knew that one’s gender identity, such as man or woman, and the enjoyment one gets from a particular sexual activity, such as penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse or receptive buttsex, are in no way directly correlated.

Sure, sometimes I want penetration to be about power, but it never had to be anymore, because now I had the freedom, and the power to decide how anything outside of me would affect me. I found that the better I got at decoupling an activity from a preconceived notion of what it means, the more fun sex became. And even when I do choose to get penetrated submissively, it always has to be about good sex first and foremost, not about some misguided morality or sexist system of beliefs.

Okay, I know this is a talk at a conference about sexuality, but let’s return for a moment to KinkForAll’s tagline:

A serendipitous, ad-hoc unconference about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life.

What about the rest of life? Are dichotomies there, too? You betcha! Here’s an obvious one:

• Black vs. White (or, more generally, race)

And here’s how we know that’s a false dichotomy:

• Barack Obama
• halle berry, jordan sparks, tony parker, derek jeter, tyson beckford (he’s jamaican and chinese), slash (the drummer from guns n roses), lisa wu hartwell

Here’s a not-so-obvious dichotomy, but one I bet most people who came to see me speak had to think about at least a little bit before they came here:

• Public / private –> Out / closeted

For those that don’t know, when Sara Eileen and I co-founded KinkForAll, we took some very heavy criticism from people who believed that the essentially open and public nature of KinkForAll events were “recklessly endangering” participants, that we would be “outing” people. I believe this criticism was spawned from a belief in that false dichotomy: that to be public is to be out, that in order to have adequate privacy, people of sexuality minorities must be closeted.

That falsehood needlessly segregates sexuality apart from the rest of our lives. In reality, no one is ever completely in the closet or out of it. You might be out about some things to some people, but not out to others. By coming to KinkForAll events, people are forced to grapple with the reality that the closet is not a binary.

Here’s another one that KinkForAll events make some people grapple with:

• Academic / non-academic (education)

also known as

• educated / uneducated
• graduate / drop-out

I like this one because I’m a middle-school drop-out. But anyway, after she gave a presentation at the very first KinkForAll in New York City, Emily Rutherford wrote this in her blog about the experience:

I think that a lot of what was exciting about [KinkForAll] is the way that the format combines academic and non-academic modes of talking about sex and sexuality. The “conference” is an academic model in a way that many existing modes of social interaction for sexuality groups aren’t, but this conference didn’t presume any academic background or qualifications. I think that [KinkForAll] bridged gaps between different registers of discussion, taking academese down a peg while applying a theoretical and philosophical level to more casual conversations.

KinkForAll is not really an “organization,” just individuals acting in concert toward a share goal; a collective, maybe. I was urged, numerous times, to trademark KinkForAll and a few people thought it needed to be a registered 501(c)3 organization to really make a difference at all. But that’s just another false dichotomy, because we don’t need to be a 501(c)3 to make a difference.

Indeed, the millennial generation–our generation–is recognizing more and more false dichotomies, and younger people are consistently speaking up to make a difference. That’s what David Jay did in 2001, when he was a 19 year old undergraduate student at Wesleyan University just a few hours from here. David said:

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

That year, David founded The Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), which became the online headquarters for the asexuality movement. David recognized that even sex drive itself is correctly seen by many as coupled to dichotomies; that mens’ drives is necessarily stronger than womens’, for instance. Contrary to popular belief, sex is not a compulsion, and the desire for sex is not a universally shared instinct.

I believe AVEN’s work is enormously important because rape culture will dissipate and victim-blaming will stop only when everyone understands that our sex drives–our feelings of lust–are an independent facet of our sociosexual makeup. Men are no more or less interested in sex because they are men than women are. Perhaps counter-intuitively, asexuality is the keystone that supports a healthily sexual society.

All right, so, let’s review. Dichotomies come in two flavors: true and false. Both kinds are useful, and potentially sexy, but not good to confuse. So don’t let “man” or “woman” jail you. Don’t even let “animal” or “person” jail you! Hell, The Supreme Court isn’t letting the insignificant detail of corporeal existence prevent corporations from being people!

The bottom line is this: don’t wait for permission to do or be something that doesn’t fit into whatever or wherever other people happen to think you are. You don’t need someone’s permission to break out of a false dichotomy, or to become empowered.

You just do it. You can do it. We broke out of restrictive dichotomies just being at KinkForAll Providence! You’re doing it now if you’re watching this video, ‘cuz you’re thinking. So you don’t need to wait for your schools, or parents, or your teachers to fill you with knowledge, or to give you permission to grow in whatever direction you want. You’re doing it already.

You become empowered whenever you do what you can to make our communities places we can be proud of, no matter how small an act it is. Cuz, y’see, your impact, even through small things, like sharing a link to some educational resource like the one I followed to find the Kinsey scale when I was a teenager, are kind of a big deal.

People with destructive goals are usually people who feel personally disempowered. So to be creative, you need to empower everyone to speak up, to have a presence—even people you don’t totally agree with.

And thinking about that, and seeing as how I broached this subject of dichotomies with quotes from a writer, I thought it fitting to end with another quote from another, recently passed writer, Howard Zinn. Howard Zinn said:

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

KinkForAll is one of my small acts. Now it’s your turn. :)

I was asked to write an essay for Furry Girl‘s latest independent porn site, Cocksexual.com. Unlike most porn sites, whose mere descriptions turn me right the fuck off, when Furry Girl described her vision of Cocksexual, I was actually intrigued. On the homepage, she calls it, pansexual porn featuring hot models of all orientations and genders. Here, you’ll find none of those tacky “lesbian” scenes with discount-bin strapons, or the cliché Mistress Fetishqueen fucking her worthless male submissive. Now that, I thought, I could get behind. Or in front of, depending.

So when Furry Girl asked me to write a piece for the launch of her site, I didn’t have any trouble and what I came up with was a touch more personal than even I was prepared for. Here’s an excerpt from my essay on Cocksexual.com:

When I first tentatively explored anal sex, which I began doing in the shower using the handle of a discarded toothbrush, I thought what I wanted was the woman’s role, passive and receptive. At that age, surrounded as I was by the false hegemonic view of penetration as being the same as masculinity, what else could I think? Maybe I was really a woman, because if being a man meant a distaste for anal pleasure, then I certainly wasn’t one of those.

But as the years went by I discovered, to my admitted surprise, that I’m not a woman. I’m a man. One’s gender identity, such as man or woman, and the enjoyment one gets from a particular sexual activity, such as penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse or strap-on sex, are in no way directly correlated. So too are sexual orientation and enjoying anal sex distinct from one another. I’ve had anal sex with both men and women, but I’ve so far enjoyed being penetrated by the women a lot more. For me, a big part of the fun is seeing their enthusiasm.

You should check out the full essay over on Furry Girl’s site. There’s also a really detailed, really personable article by Thomas Roche, and another by Essin Em. It’s pretty neat to find myself in the company of such well-known writers.

Finally, I made some money writing that essay and I’m now looking for paid writing gigs that align with my worldview and message, as this one did. The feeling of getting financially supported—rather than financially “compensated”—for sharing an intimate part of myself in writing is absolutely wonderful. I sincerely hope I can find or make more opportunities to do it again.

Thanks for the first opportunity, Furry Girl, and good luck with Cocksexual.com. I hope it shows more people, especially more men, that they can enjoy strap-on sex without the stigmas so many other pornographers drown it in.

Obviously, since I think this topic is so important, I want to share it with you here. The video below is a recording of my presentation, which I titled “Freeing Sexuality Information: Why you can change the world by talking about yourself.” All of the materials used in the presentation are Creative Commons licensed, so you can also redistribute the presentation by downloading and republishing it—and I strongly encourage you to do so.

Freeing Sexuality Information – KinkForAll Boston from maymay on Vimeo.

Download the presentation files here:

• Freeing Sexuality Information keynote presentation as a ZIP archive
• Freeing Sexuality Information presentation as PDF document.
• Freeing Sexuality Information transcript in plain text.

Anyway, for an ill-publicized and ill-fated event, having lost our venue only 8 days prior to the unconference, KinkForAll Boston was a remarkable success. Some of my favorite moments included:

• Late in the day, a participant who originally wore an orange “do not photograph me” sticker on his name tag removed it because, and I quote, he said “I think [doing this is] very important.” That, right there, blew me away.
• Our amazing venue heroes, Liz of the Boston University Women’s Resource Center (BUWRC) came up to me after the event was over and said, “This was amazing. I learned so much.” She then told me she’d love to have some of the speakers at the BUWRC to give hour-long talks because “there was so much more we couldn’t get at in just 20 minutes.” I encouraged her to reach out to any speaker she found interesting by emailing them; everyone who’s willing to be emailed has already posted their email address on the KinkForAll Boston event homepage.
• Discussions during lunch time focused on the differences and mis-uses of the language of our sexuality, which reminded me of an extension of KinkForAll New York City 2‘s presentation by Seth called “Language In The Kinky Community”. At one point during the discussion, someone said, “Wow, this is so interesting. There should be a presentation about this!” And low-and-behold, Heliotrope had already signed up on the schedule grid to do a presentation on that very topic! (Video of her presentation is now availableis forthcoming.)
• In the morning, Boston Boy gave a great presentation about the legalities of consensual sadomasochistic behavior called “Assault, Battery, and You” but he was uncomfortable with any recording so we never recorded it. Later, after he listened to me giving my presentation, he approached me and said that now that he’d thought about it more, he wished we had recorded his presentation after all. (I do too—it was fantastic.) It was very gratifying to see this motif of people becoming more and more comfortable—and more brave—about sharing what they know in public spheres after they see me doing exactly that.
• (There were many more moments like this, and I might update this list with the others as I recall them.)

My sincerest thanks go out to everyone who participated in KinkForAll Boston, regardless of whether you were there in person or simply joined the conversation on the Internet. And on that note, if you did participate in any way (either in-person or online), please take a moment to help the unorganizers out by filling out the KinkForAll Boston participant questionnaire.

Following is the full transcript of my presentation. Again, please feel free to republish this anywhere you like as long as you link back to this post.

Thank you all for coming to another KinkForAll unconference! Although this will be the 3rd event of its kind, it’s the 1st one that’s made it outside New York City, which I think is a bit of a milestone. I’m going to take the opportunity in my presentation to take a brief look at the current state of sexuality information in the world with you and encourage you to peer through the looking glass with me about where we might be going with such things in the future.

What does information about sexuality look like today? How do people get it, what does it contain–or exclude–and how do people share it? Today, we are interacting with two extremely different dimensions of sex information. In one dimension, a recent creation, huge amounts of information is freely available and ranges the gamut of different sexual activities, interests, and influences. In the other dimension, however, information about sex in any form is extremely restricted and is even dangerous to have, speak about, or reference.

What are these dimensions of “sex data”? There are a number of facets, but the most practical way to look at the situation is—unsurprisingly—through the lens of the Internet. On the Internet, many people do things with relatively little fear. In other realms, such as at in-person gatherings like this one, many of these people who might otherwise be willing to reach outside their comfort zone online are much more apprehensive, much more fearful. This invokes an obvious question: why? For the answer, let’s first look at mass-market sexuality information.

Arguably the most influential sex educator in the history of the world is Oprah Winfrey. Sadly, however, her pop-culture popularity belies her ignorance of sexuality, which so strongly focuses on female victimization that one of her recent TV shows warned of “graphic content that is suitable for mature audiences only” because of its depiction of a diagram from a high school biology textbook showing the anatomical location of the vagina. Evidently, according to Oprah, simply being told where the vagina is located on the human body is “graphic,” and requires warnings.

Oprah’s discomfort with the very basics of sexual anatomy is disturbing, but there are other, even more frightening examples of sexual unease in the American mainstream. In fact, some people participating in this event have been criticized on national television by these more evangelical fear mongers. It’s tempting to make things personal, but doing so is ultimately tangential to the point of this talk, which is about freeing “sex data.”

What all of these prominent people have in common is that they are widely regarded as experts. As experts, they have a certain amount of influence over many of the things they discuss, and they are using that influence to reinforce the set of standards for sexual data that exist today. Let’s look at these standards.

One such standard is the law. Recently, right here in Massachusetts, Kathi-Anne Reinstein (your state representative) has introduced a bill making it a crime for anyone over 60 to pose nude…for film or photo. Moreover, the law also criminalizes nude or sexual photography of the physically disabled…regardless of mental capacity. Apparently, in Massachusetts [if this bill passes,] you lose control over your sexuality when you lose control over your legs. Furthermore, as many of you are aware, in many states it’s illegal for two people who are recognized by the government as being of the same sex to marry. That’s a standard from which many of our society’s systems, both social and otherwise, draws data. Changing the law changes other systems.

Another such standard of sexual data (all data, really) is the dictionary. A common definition of the word “pretty” that most dictionaries publish is: “pleasing by delicacy or grace; not imposing; [such as] ‘pretty song’; ‘pretty room’; ‘pretty girl’”. Imagine what would change in our use of the English language in reference to “girl” and “boy” if the dictionary would have instead given, “pretty person” as one of its examples.

One final example I’d like to show you is the case of UK-based Filament Magazine who, by way of responding to reader feedback, planned to include a photo set of an aroused man in their second (September) issue. … [Their] printers, however, refused to go along with the publication, forcing Filament to do business elsewhere. Amidst the plethora of top-shelf magazines featuring scantily clad and open-legged women, the struggles faced by Filament highlight a deeply entrenched sexism: men can look at women but women cannot look at men. In other words, we are still being told what we are allowed to view, what we are allowed to think about, and what we are allowed to want.

This holds true even if the things we see aren’t the things we actually want. It turns out that our own notions of ideals aren’t what we’re told they are. In fact, in Britain, national polls show that men’s preferences for women’s bodies are several sizes larger than most think. The most profound truth, one Oprah consistently neglects to discuss, is that, human experience itself is diverse. In the age of the Internet, everyone gets a place to say what it is they want. No one can deny it, and no one can nay-say it: you are the only expert, and have the only reliable resource in knowing your own desires—yourself.

So what does all this have to do with freeing sexuality information? These standards, the law, mainstream publishing, and the Internet, all affect the availability not only of information about sexuality, but of information about every topic imaginable. Information is like a network, a web of connections from one topic to another. Like the Internet, it’s possible to get at any piece of information from any other piece of information near instantaneously. But we can’t just teleport there, we have to build the bridges, and make the links, ourselves.

Granted, that’s a big job, and we don’t have a whole lot of good, free resources to begin with. But it’s not impossible. Let me tell you a story: Tired and hungry after a long trek in the wilderness, a traveler approaches a village. She tries to barter for food, but the villagers don’t want to give any away because of the famine they’re suffering. So the traveler takes out her cookware, boils some water in a pot, and drops a stone in it. Curious, a villager asks what she is doing. “I’m cooking stone soup,” she says, “It’s delicious, but it would taste even better with a little bit of garnish.” Comfortable giving up only “a little bit of garnish” to help the hungry traveler out, the curious villager adds it to the soup. Another villager walks by inquiring about the pot, and the traveler again mentions her stone soup which hasn’t reached its full potential yet. So the second villager adds a little bit of seasoning to help. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient. Finally, a delicious and nourishing (not to mention large) pot of soup is enjoyed by all.

As you may have guessed, this old story is an analogy to the current state of sex information. You and I are hungry travelers—the outliers. We see a better world but don’t have the ingredients to make it a reality by ourselves. So we start talking—to ourselves, at first, in open, public online diaries (“blogs”). Then other people get curious about us and What It Is That We Do. We build a small community, one in which people are excellent to one another, where we can build tools to share what we know and to keep us safe, made possible because other curious people have brought their own information and pooled it with ours.

This is the future of sex information. Open, honest, and freely available. Non-commercial. Today, Human sexuality, and especially accurate nonjudgmental sex information has [been] commodified, locked down and made virtually inaccessible by interests ranging from politics to exclusivity agreements—sex ed DRM, if you will. So to build the bridges, to make the links, you, the experts, need to start sharing what you know. Not just about sex, but everything that has to do with your life. Everything that touches your life can also touch your sexuality, because information is a web of links.

I don’t know what we’ll be able to create with that kind of freedom. No one does. But one thing is certain: the only way to create it is to free sexuality information.

Thank you for listening. Thank you even more for creating.