Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed › Politics of sex

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Open Thread: When Educators Are Censors

Category labels: Personal experience, Politics of sex, Vanilla life

Earlier this month, I was forced to deal with a frightening attack on my personal integrity and one of my sex-positivity projects. Thankfully, no serious damage to anyone or anything was done, but the attack helped me see that these experiences have now become a pattern. In other words, as it’s already happened several times over the course of the last year, I realize they’re probably not going to stop soon.

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 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.

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Monday, February 8, 2010

On Dichotomies that (No Longer) Jail Me – KinkForAll Providence

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Communication, D/s dynamics, Kink events, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Myths and misconceptions, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Vanilla life

This past Saturday, KinkForAll Providence was hosted at Brown University and sponsored by the Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council (SHEEC), chaired by undergraduate student Aida Manduley. I had an awesome time. The unconference sparked fantastically interesting and very important conversations, including discussions about the approach different cultures have to sex and sexuality (notably traditional Mexican and Puerto Rican culture), how people with otherwise “alternative” views can fit into and become personally empowered within a larger mainstream that they are often swimming against, and many more things.

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:

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. :)

Tagged with: KFAPVD, KinkForAll

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Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Celebrate Sexual Freedom in Rhode Island! Come to KinkForAll Providence!

Category labels: Kink events, Politics of sex

I am super psyched about KinkForAll Providence.

If you don’t yet know, KinkForAll is a series of free, educational sexuality events in the form of user-generated real-world conferences. The next one is taking place in Brown University this upcoming Saturday, February 6^th, organized by Emma and sponsored in part by the Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council, a student-run group chaired by the stunningly pro-active Aida Manduley. To echo Aida’s pitch: If you’re sex-positive, sex-curious, and/or just plain sexy, you should consider attending a KinkForAll.

KinkForAll Providence is going to be the 5^th event held in the first year. Let me say that again: KinkForAll Providence is going to be the 5^th KinkForAll event being held in the 1-year history of the event’s conception. That’s one KinkForAll, in 4 different cities, just about every 2 months or so for a whole year! Wow!

KinkForAll began because sexuality communities had a real need to mix and mingle in a non-eroticized environment where the exchange of ideas took precedence over the exchange of bodily fluids. More than that, it spread because early participants recognized the need for this country’s (and perhaps the world’s) public discourse about issues relating to sexuality to engage everyone—not just activists—about sexual freedom and diversity.

It’s no longer acceptable to us for GLBT groups to exclude issues of transsexuality from the political debate. It’s not okay for same-sex marriage advocates to push for equal recognition of their relationships while downplaying the rights of polyamorous people to have similar partner benefits. People in the mainstream are increasingly speaking up in support of breaking fringe sexualities like BDSM out of secretive ghettos. We’re gonna hit a tipping point really soon, if we haven’t already.

Come out and help us push forward. And if you can’t make it in person for any reason at all, participate online using any of the online participation tools we’re putting together on the KinkForAll Providence Live page!

Below is the “text flyer” that I cribbed from a previous KinkForAll event and modified to reflect KinkForAll Providence. I’d be super grateful if you would consider cross-posting this on your blog to help spread the word about KinkForAll Providence this Saturday. There’s also a formal KinkForAll Providence press release if you want to send it to anybody who expects such things.

PLEASE COPY AND CROSSPOST THIS MESSAGE FREELY.

KinkForAll is an ad-hoc educational unconference about the convergence of sexuality with the rest of life for anyone and everyone. It is 100% free and open to the public. Anyone with the desire to learn or with something to contribute is welcome and invited to participate.

Vitals
======
What: A free and highly social day of sexuality education and discussion.
Why: To inspire a creative, interactive and open environment where everyone feels comfortable talking and learning about all things that sexuality relates to in their lives.
When: February 6^th, 2010 at 10:00 AM
Where: Brown University, Wilson Hall, Main Green in Providence, Rhode Island
Who: Everyone
How much: FREE (as in beer as well as freedom)

Details
=======

KinkForAll is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people of all persuasions to share and learn in an open environment. It is a fast-paced event with discussions, presentations, and interaction from all participants. (It is inspired by the BarCamp community.)

ANYONE WITH SOMETHING TO CONTRIBUTE OR WITH THE DESIRE TO LEARN IS WELCOME AND INVITED TO JOIN. When you attend, be prepared to share with others. When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

A KinkForAll is a special kind of gathering because there are no spectators, only participants. Attendees must give a talk or a presentation, help with one, or otherwise contribute in some way to support the event. This is called sharing and we like it. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen—there are no pre-scheduled presentations or keynote addresses. The people present at the event will select the presentations they want to see.

Anyone can lead a session, on any topic related to sexuality. You do not necessarily have to teach a new skill or idea. You might share an experience, facilitate a discussion, or read a poem. The goal is to start a conversation, make connections (and maybe even friends), and exchange knowledge. Presentations promoting specific commercial products or companies are discouraged.

Learn more about what to expect at
http://wiki.kinkforall.org/WhatToExpect

Learn more about the event guidelines at
http://wiki.kinkforall.org/TheRulesOfKinkForAll

Get Involved
============

We need your help in spreading the word. Please help by participating.

Here’s how:

1. Get excited by reading fellow participants’ topic ideas on
http://wiki.kinkforall.org/KinkForAllProvidence
2. Add your name or handle to the list of participants
3. Join the mailing list and introduce yourself by emailing
kinkforall@googlegroups.com
4. Show up!

Still have questions? Read the Frequently Asked Questions at
http://wiki.kinkforall.org/FrequentlyAskedQuestions

or email kinkforall@googlegroups.com for more details.

KinkForAll Online
==============

Participate online before the event at your favorite social networking web site:

Homepage: http://wiki.KinkForAll.org
Google: http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall
Twitter: http://twitter.com/KinkForAll
Identica: http://identi.ca/kinkforall
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/KinkForAll/40066342762
Fetlife: http://fetlife.com/groups/2962

All organizational efforts are coordinated in public via the mailing list. Join for free and help turn ideas into realities!

http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall

Comments (0)

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Please read poignant commentary on Hope Witsell’s suicide

Category labels: Politics of sex, Sexism, Writing and blogging

This morning, I woke up and followed a link to some incredibly poignant commentary about Hope Witsell’s suicide, a topic I tried and failed to talk about the way I wanted to on the most recent Kink On Tap episode. Thankfully, I now have Sylvia’s words to put to my feelings. In What happened to Hope Witsell, Sylvia writes:

It was not that, as this putrid “news” article disgustingly asserts, “The downward spiral of Hope’s life was unstoppable.”

If everyone I know who had a picture of their boobs on the internet before their 18th birthday killed themselves, I’d have a lot of dead friends. I wouldn’t be around to remember them, though, since I’d be dead too.

It wasn’t SEXTING.

It was you, adults, all the adults in her life.

I feel that the full blog post is simply required reading.

On Twitter, Cos pointed me at another commentary from The Curvature. He sent this commentary to Andrew Meacham, the author of the original news story. Although I tried, I simply couldn’t read through Mr. Meacham’s article because of the overwhelming anger I felt at each turn where he (and the numerous commenters on the article) twisted this story around to blame Hope herself, to stigmatize her because she was stigmatized, to shame her for being a victim, to paint her as the one to be punished for her “impetuous move.”

We as a society have become so good at victimizing victims, at absolving ourselves of any wrongdoing, of telling ourselves all the lies we need to hear to make everyone believe “there was nothing we could do,” when in fact we did nothing at best, or were the active ingredient in creating the terminal disease of sexual shaming at worst. If you can’t see that there is a parasitic insistence of a karmic theory of she-got-what-she-deserved so insidiously lodged into the minds and hearts of so many people, then you may not have Hope’s—and other youth like Hope’s—best interests in mind. For god’s sake, please look again.

In her TEDTalk, gang rape survivor and real-life hero Sunitha Krishnan, says:

I was 15 when I was gang raped by 8 men. I don’t remember the rape part of it so much as much as the anger part of it. Yes, there were 8 men who defiled me, raped me, but that didn’t go into my consciousness. I never felt like a rape victim then or now. But what lingered from then to now—I’m 40 today—is this huge outrageous anger. [For] two years I was ostracized, I was stigmatized, I was isolated because I was a victim. […] We, as a civil society, we have Ph.D.s in victimizing a victim.

(Skip to 2:45 for the quote.)

Back on Twitter, Cos urged me to write to Mr. Meacham. So I wrote him this, which I want to share here:

Dear Mr. Meacham,

I am writing to direct your attention to some very poignant commentary regarding your article in the St. Petersburg Times printed on the TampaBay.com website covering the tragic suicide of Hope Witsell.

The commentary I hope you will read is here:

http://sylviasproblem.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/what-happened-to-hope-witsell/

I believe the commentary I linked above is extremely important because it expressly discusses the angle with which news stories like this are covered and provides some insight into how to do so in order to help the Witsell and other families in the future.

It is my sincerest hope that you read the above commentary with an open mind.

Thank you very much.

This is about all I can take before breakfast time. I hope the rest of my day isn’t quite so depressing.

Update: Mr. Meacham replied to my email, although I won’t republish his email here as I never asked if I could do so. My understanding of his reply is that, as a reporter, he feels it is only appropriate to report on things that actually occurred (i.e., tangible events), and not to make any implications about their cause or effects. This is a very appropriate thing for a reporter to be doing.

Comments (5)

Monday, November 23, 2009

Sexual Adultism at KinkForAll Washington DC

Category labels: Generation gap, Kink events, Politics of sex, Vanilla life

Over the weekend, I participated in KinkForAll Washington DC, which was small but amazing. Without a doubt, this was the most controversial KinkForAll unconference we’ve held, because the original venue was going to be the Bethesda Chevy-Chase High School. The idea that we’d have an educational sexuality event at a high school instantly put many people on guard.

Quite a number of people who signed up to participate on the wiki page removed their names. Some also unsubscribed from the KinkForAll mailing list. A few even went so far as to accuse me, personally, of carelessly risking getting everyone involved registered as sex offenders. The amount of backlash coming from the alternative sexuality communities—groups of people who are supposedly sexually progressive—to the idea of being available to minors totally blew me away.

I was so surprised, saddened, and disappointed by the vehemence of the opposition from otherwise freedom-loving people that I resolved to use my presentation slot at KFADC to share my thoughts about youth sexuality. I video recorded the presentation I gave, which I titled, “Sexual Adultism: The tragedy of youth sexual oppression.” A full transcript as well as a downloadable copy of the presentation is below. Please help me spread awareness of this important issue by redistributing this presentation or sharing a link back to this page.

Sexual Adultism – KinkForAll Washington DC from maymay on Vimeo.

Download the presentation files here:

Anyway, for an event that was bad-mouthed, and suffered from incredible amounts of FUD, not to mention legal and political struggles, the unconference was surprisingly well-attended and extraordinarily vibrant. I counted just over 30 people by lunch time, and more showed up after the lunch break. I think I can safely say that about 50 people participated over the course of the day.

Even more heartwarming than the attendance numbers, numerous teenagers and some minors were present. The president of a local high school Gay Straight Alliance not only showed up, but also lead a discussion! One of the points she made was how vital the support of school administration is in running an effective GSA. She told story after story of unhelpful and helpful school Principles, teachers, and other adults. The overtones of adultism in the frustrating stories were unmistakeable.

My favorite part about KFADC was after the event itself, when a group of about 15 of us went for dinner at a nearby noodle restaurant. One man came up to me privately and said, “I just wanted to let you know that you changed my mind about the youth issue.”

“Really?” I asked, smiling.

“Yeah,” he explained. “I joined the KinkForAll mailing list and saw the arguments about minors and was just instantly put off. I started think that maybe this was a bad idea. But then, after listening to your presentation, I realized how stupid the fighting was.”

The ensuing conversation was the highlight of my day. Even if I only opened one person’s eyes about how damaging sexual adultism really is, then I think all of my efforts over the past few months was well worth it, because we have to start somewhere. Why not here?

Since this post is getting linked a lot more than the transcript of my presentation is, I decided to put the transcript into the Post, so, below, you’ll find an embedded version of the full transcript. Additionally, you might also find the precursor to this post, On Youth, Sexuality, Education, and Your Fears, worth reading, as well.

Thank you all for coming to KinkForAll Washington DC. As some of you may already be aware, the original venue of this event were classrooms at the Bethesda Chevy-Chase High School. We’ve changed venues, however, due to pressure from the Montgomery County School Board, who cited fears that this event would attract sex offenders to the school grounds and thus put schoolchildren at risk. So, without some small effort, we moved.

If the fears of the school board were an isolated case, I probably wouldn’t be giving this talk. But the school board’s reactions to bar this unconference from happening in high school classrooms exemplify a nation-wide pandemic of a disease so insidious and so virulent that the numbers of people who are harmed or even killed by it is literally uncountable. The root of this disease is called adultism.

For those who are unaware of this phenomenon, indulge me in a brief digression to define the concept. Adam Fletcher, founder of The Freechild Project, defines adultism thusly:

Adultism is discrimination against young people. It happens anytime children or youth are ignored, silenced, neglected or punished because they are not adults. [...] adultism is part of the structure of society and its institutions, including families, schools, churches and the government. [...] adultism is expressed by treating the young person as weak, helpless and less intelligent than adults.

John Bell says:

adultism refers to behaviors and attitudes based on the assumption that adults are better than young people, and entitled to act upon young people without their agreement. [...] As children, most young people are told what to eat, what to wear, when to go to bed, when they can talk, that they will go to school, which friends are okay, and when they are to be in the house.

[...]

If this were a description of the way a group of adults was treated, we would all agree that their oppression was almost total. However, for the most part, the adult world considers this treatment of young people as acceptable because we were treated in much the same way, and internalized the idea that ‘that’s the way you treat kids.’

Bell’s explanation continues,

The essence of adultism is disrespect of the young. Consider how the following comments are essentially disrespectful. What are the assumptions behind each of them? Do you remember having heard any of these as a younger person?

“You’re so smart for fifteen!”

“You are too old for that!” or “You’re not old enough!”

“What do you know? You haven’t experienced anything!”

“It’s just a stage. You’ll outgrow it.”

I can think of no function of society unhindered by adultism. In wishing to restrict high schoolers and other young people from participating in this event, where sexuality is discussed publicly and peer-to-peer education about sexuality is a driving goal, one is falling prey to adultism. This wish also highlights a secondary deeply-ingrained problem: sexual paranoia. No where are the symptoms of sexual paranoia more prevalent than when they intersect with the young.

The symptoms of sexual paranoia are unambiguous and unmistakable. They include spreading sexual misinformation, internalizing shame about sexuality, feeling afraid of sex and sexual expression, and ultimately desiring to promote censorship of all things sexuality-related as a form of so-called “protection.” Further, in the worst cases, it leads to agoraphobia and deaths, often by suicide.

Now, it’s important to mention that the people perpetuating the climate of fear around sexuality and youth truly believe they are protecting society in general and young people in specific. It’s admirable to want to protect our kids from pedophiles, our daughters from over pushy gray-raping boyfriends, and even ourselves from being registered as sex offenders for no good reason. Even if their actions are not rational, their fears are not imagined. But until we educate our children, our policy makers, and ourselves, we will all be forever doomed to live in fear–of the dirty old man down the street, of over-eager prosecutors and politicians, or even of our own bodies.

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.

Adultist sex-negativity is, of course, the intersection of two realms of fear-mongering: the sex is going to turn us all into sinners one, and the everything in the world is going to kill our children one. The effects of this pandemic fearfulness are devastating in the mainstream population but it’s even more devastating in minority and alternative sexuality communities. As Ramon Johnson points out in his article on LGBT suicide:

[LGBTQ] youth are up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers, according to the Massachusetts 2006 Youth Risk Survey. A 2007 San Francisco State University Chavez Center Institute study shows that LGBT and questioning youth who come from a rejecting family are up to nine times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. And for every completed suicide by a young person, it is estimated that 100 to 200 attempts are made (2003 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey).

In society’s rush to protect our children from harmful sexuality, children’s own defense mechanisms have been damaged. As Erin Runnion, founder of The Joyful Child foundation, which aims to protect children against sexual molestation, says, Kids need their freedom. At some point they’re going to have to take care of themselves, so it’s better to start empowering them and giving them the confidence that they can handle that, and that they can handle their world, than to make them so afraid that it’s just an evil place. (Quote is at 19:57 in Episode 8, Season 6 of “Penn & Teller’s: Bullsh*t!”)

This misguided approach to protecting children from the dangers of the world simultaneously piles unreasonable expectations on parents, teachers, policy-makers, and law enforcement. In 2003, the Dallas Observer reported on the case of Jacqueline Mercado and her boyfriend, who were arrested and indicted for “sexual performance of a child” when they developed a photograph of their 1-year-old son breastfeeding from Jacqueline’s breast at a local drugstore. Child Protective Services took away their two children and ordered all kinds of onerous counseling and tests. To any reasonable person not infected by sexual paranoia, seeing a mother breastfeeding her child would not incite the kind of fear that it clearly did in the case of the this photo developer.

Stories like Jacqueline’s are not uncommon. A similar story appeared just a few months ago when a Wal-Mart employee in Arizona reported Mr. and Mrs. Demaree to the cops as sex offenders and child pornographers for attempting to develop photographs of their three daughters, each younger than 5, taking a bath. As a result, the three little girls were taken away from their parents for more than a month.

The drugstore and Wal-Mart employees in these cases, and the Montgomery County School Board in the case of ousting this event from school grounds, were probably all imagining the dirty old man down the street. But such unsavory characters are more often the stuff of nightmares than reality. In fact, according to the US Department of Justice’s statistical report entitled, Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement, 14 year old teenagers are apparently the most sexually dangerous group in America. (Reference: Figure 6, pg 8 of US Department of Justice statistical report, “Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement: Victim, Incident, and Offender Characteristics”.)

How can 14 year olds be the most likely group of American citizens to be child molesters and sex offenders? Well, according to a 2008 news article in the Seattle P-I, more than 3,500 teenagers and adolescents in the State of Washington averaging 14 years old have been charged and convicted as felony sex offenders since 1997.

In December of 2006, the Denver Post reported on a Utah court case in which two 13 year old heterosexual adolescents were convicted of sexually molesting each other. They, too, are now both registered sex offenders. This story showcases a horrible double-standard of youth sexuality: at 13, you’re too young to be capable of consenting to sex, but apparently you’re old enough to consciously decide to sexually molest someone else.

In Georgia, then-17 year old Wendy Whitaker became a registered sex offender for having consensual oral sex with a fellow high school classmate 3 weeks before his 16th birthday. Now a housewife, she filed a lawsuit against the state of Georgia that says, “The gravity of Whitaker’s offense ‘bears no reasonable relationship’ to the harshness of her penalty.”

There’s little about paranoia that can be reasonable. Whitaker’s case is interesting because had she committed her “crime” just three weeks later, her legal standing today would be dramatically different. It raises the question: is age a reasonable measure for determining the criminality of sexual activity? If so, at what age should sexual curiosity become criminal? At what age should it stop?

Unfortunately, today’s laws codify a supreme oversimplification of the issues at hand. Age itself is merely a number, and setting any age as the primary or sole determining factor of criminality reduces consent to a boolean value: either you can or you can’t. But we all know that the issue is much more complicated than that. While it’s appropriate for individuals and society to protect children, the societal fear of youth sexuality so tragically overshadows rational thinking in so many cases that the result isn’t protection, but censorship and a sexuality information deficit that causes terrible emotional damage to the very youth they claim to be protecting.

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. Many people fail to understand this, possibly because of the prevalence of sexual paranoia.

Young or old, no one is safe from it. And in the last decade, the instances of the kinds of cases I mentioned earlier has not slowed. Even more frightening, the irrational age line is changing as panic over youth sexuality increases.

Also in December of 2006, a four year old boy in Waco, Texas was punished with an in-school suspension for hugging a teacher’s aide while boarding the school bus because the aide complained that he had brushed his face against her breast. Whether or not this toddler experienced sexual feelings is not the point; the point is that his expression of it is probably not malicious, and it was CERTAINLY not actually threatening to the teacher’s aide. And if you think this only happens in the Bible Belt, you’re sadly mistaken. In fact, during the school year of 2005-2006 right here in the State of Maryland, 28 kindergartners were suspended for sex offenses, including 15 for sexual harassment.

One writer who blogs at Classically Liberal crystalized what sexual paranoia is doing to our children today:

Once you reach a certain age, having sex with people your own age is normally not considered a crime. The explosion of “youthful sex offenders” is not the result of our kids becoming perverts. It is the result of the law criminalizing what is a normal part of growing up.”

Sexual paranoia incites people to act in paternalistic and contradictory ways. These young people are not the face of society’s worst criminals. Only a decade or so ago, doing what any one of these youth I just described did could very well have been YOU. In fact, if I had not been such an isolated child, it would have been me.

When I was an adolescent, it would have changed my life for the better to be able to be in a public, safe place where people discussed sexuality freely–a place like this event. But I never got that opportunity because places like this didn’t exist. Instead, to get information about sex, bisexuality, and everything else that sexuality was related to in my life–which, as a boy going through puberty, was a lot!–I hid behind the glow of my computer screen in a dark room.

In other words, I was a closeted teenager. I began masturbating at 9 years old, but I was in the closet about that until I turned 15, when I finally talked to a girl who would become my first girlfriend about it. By the way, she was 17, and we gave each other head lots of times. Should she, like Wendy Whitaker, be branded a criminal? In either case, I don’t think so.

Put simply, the closet is not a safe place to be. Whenever you’re afraid to reveal something about yourself, someone else can harm you by revealing that truth. Most teens and younger people, regardless of their sexual orientation, are closeted. They, like I before them, are afraid of discussing their sexuality openly and matter-of-factly. Youth keep any and all sexual activity or sexual curiosity hidden for fear of being punished for it.

In his 1999 talk, Censorship and the Fear of Sexuality, Dr. Marty Klein says:

Children know they’re sexual, so most conclude that they are bad. Unconsciously, kids fear being abandoned or destroyed because of their sexuality. This is not a metaphorical fear–for young children, 100% dependent on the caretaking and good will of their parents, it is a literal fear. In terror, kids learn to hide, deny, repress, and distort their sexuality.

When I was 10, my family got an America Online account. That’s when I discovered the Internet and, of course, pornographic websites. I was afraid to hit the “I am over 18 years of age” button when I wasn’t and yet I did so anyway. I wanted to learn about sexuality from people who were willing to talk about it with me, not engage in it with me.

The uncensored Internet was one of the tools that helped me come out of the closet, that helped me develop a healthy and respectful sexual understanding of myself and of others. It wasn’t the perfect tool, and so today I’m working on making it better, but I fully believe that I would have been a statistic in Ramon Johnson’s suicide article had it not been for the miniscule amount of information about sexuality that I found online.

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 the same 1999 talk, Dr. Klein said:

Talk of censorship typically leads to thoughts of “pornography.” But that’s only one aspect of sexual censorship. Other targets include sex education, contraceptive advertising, fiction, sex surveys, the Internet, and public nudity. The Color Purple, Our Bodies Ourselves, and Ms. Magazine, for example, have all been banned from various high school libraries in supposedly liberal California.

The fear of one’s own sexuality with which frightened parents routinely indoctrinate their children in a vicious cycle of adultism and sexual oppression, is far, far more damaging to most children than sex education, contraceptive advertising, or fiction could ever be. And yet it is those avenues of information, even when they’re not sexualized, that are often attacked by sexually paranoid parents and educators on a startlingly routine basis.

Earlier this month, Cory Doctorow’s first young adult novel, Little Brother, received criticism. Was it a badly written book? No. In an article on Locus Online, Cory Doctorow explains:

I didn’t expect[...]that I would receive a torrent of correspondence and entreaties from teachers, students, parents, and librarians who were angry, worried, or upset that Marcus [the main character] loses his virginity about two-thirds of the way through the book. [...T]he sex-scene in the book is anything but explicit. [...] There is no anatomy, no grunts or squeals, no smells or tastes. This isn’t there to titillate. It’s there because it makes plot-sense and story-sense and character-sense for these two characters to do this deed at this time.

[...]

I remain baffled by adults who object to the sex in this book. Not because it’s prudish to object, but because the off-camera sex occurs in the middle of a story that features rioting, graphic torture, and detailed instructions for successful truancy.

When I needed sexuality information as an adolescent my schools, my teachers, my parents, and even my trusted adult friends would not talk to me about it. I suspect they must have been afraid of the very things I sense some people who wish to restrict the access of minors to educational events like these KinkForAll unconferences are afraid of. Finding information about sexuality in public libraries and on the Internet very literally saved my young, questioning, and very isolated life. I don’t want any other young person to go through the isolation and uncertainty I felt about my own sexuality at that age. Do you?

As clinical sexologist Becky Knight said,

It’s kind of amazing to me that so many people wish they had better information and guidance when they were young, but then they fail to provide it for the next generation. Information about sex and relationships is critical for young people if they are going to grow into sexually healthy and happy adults. Some people can find it on their own, but many people suffer from misinformation and misunderstandings that could have been helped by simply getting accurate information earlier on.

Young people today are in the closet because they are not treated equally, because too many adults think the phrase “freedom” and especially “sexual freedom” only apply when someone turns 16, or 18, or whatever the ages of consent or majority, which both vary wildly across regions of the world, happens to kick in.

In fact, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik says that the younger children are, the more morally they tend to behave. (Skip to 57 seconds into the video.) Take, for example, the case of 10 year old Arkansas resident Will Phillips, who made national headlines a few weeks ago when he refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in school (you know, the one that ends with liberty and justice for all) until gay and lesbian people have equal rights to marry whomever they love, just as heterosexual people do.

Will recently appeared on CNN for an interview alongside his father, Jay Phillips. When asked if his son was prepared for the media attention, Mr. Phillips said his son saw it as an opportunity to raise awareness: He felt that just because he’s ten years old doesn’t mean he doesn’t have opinions, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have rights, and doesn’t mean he can’t make a difference.

So it seems to me that young people are often painfully aware of fundamental human rights and have an intellectual and moral capacity as keenly developed as any of the healthiest adults. I submit to you today that freedom is not something that we can put to a vote, nor is it something that someone should be made to wait 18 years for, because they should have it from the moment they enter into this world. And this is not a new idea.

The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights says (paraphrased):

Every man, woman, and child on Earth is born free and equal in dignity and rights. [...] Everyone is entitled to the rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights regardless of age[...]. You have the right to live in freedom and safety. Nobody has the right to treat you as their slave. The law is the same for everyone. You have the right to think what you want and say what you like, to organize peacefully, [and] to take part in your country’s political affairs. The society in which you live should help you to develop. Education should strive to promote peace and understanding among all people.

Here’s some food for thought: there’s a word for minors who are legally able to make their own choices. That word is ‘emancipated.’ In other words, most minors are not emancipated. This word might sound familiar, since it’s in the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed African-American slaves from the legal control of their owners across the United States. On that note, imagine what kind of priority adults might make education and childcare if school children could vote.

You might be thinking to yourself, ‘This is too much, too radical, too dangerous, too risky.’ Yes, it is a lot, it is radical, it is dangerous, and it is risky. But it is not merely possible, it is necessary. We will not have a world free of sexism, classism, racism, or religious persecution if we do not also empower our children to actually live a life of equal dignity and rights from the moment they join us here.

In order for our children and ourselves to live free of fear, we must eradicate this pandemic of sexual paranoia and its symptoms of sexual adultism. And we can, because there are enough people around who want to make the world a better place. You can be the cure this world needs.

On a blog post that I wrote while trying to come up with this presentation, one commenter said this:

Whenever I think about sex education and young people, I’m left with my persistent conviction that lack of real education about sex and relationships nearly got me raped at fourteen. This…leaves me rather emotional about the subject.

I’m typing this with my three month old daughter asleep in my lap.

This also leaves me rather emotional about the subject.

I need to know how to do for her better than was done for me.

With that in mind, I challenge you–each and every one of you listening to me speak, whether you’re hearing me in person today or you’re watching this presentation from a recording a month from now, a year from now, or a decade from now–I challenge you to take it upon yourself to be an educational hero and make accurate, rational, nonjudgmental sex education a real priority. You can do it by pressuring your school districts, politicians, and teachers to promote body-positive materials in classrooms. You can do it by sharing a link to a sex-positive article or posting a tweet about this talk. Help one person–just one person–to make something better for themselves than was done for you.

Thank you very much.

Tagged with: KFADC, KinkForAll

Comments (25)

Sunday, November 1, 2009

On Youth, Sexuality, Education, and Your Fears

Category labels: Community, Generation gap, Kink events, Personal history, Politics of sex, Vanilla life

In just 3 weeks time, on November 21^st, the sexuality education, health, and rights conference series that many people, including me, have been working on for months is going to be held at the Montgomery County Executive Office Building, a 5 minute walk from the Rockville Metro station in the Washington, DC metro area. I’m totally psyched about it because, thanks to the incredible work of Nikolas Coukouma and numerous generous donors, we have a large cafeteria space in a public building.

Being in a public venue is a big deal because most sexuality communities are extremely afraid of using public resources for doing their work. Few that I know about in the sex-positive sphere think to use community resources, instead choosing to segregate themselves from the rest of their local community. I think that’s supremely unfortunate, and it totally fails to send a message of inclusion, acceptance, and diversity that’s so central to (among other things) sexual health.

The other reason having a public venue for the conference, which we call the KinkForAll Washington DC “unconference,” is a big deal is because it legally solidifies the “open to the public” nature of the event. As it is a conference that invites anyone with the desire to learn or with something to contribute to attend and speak at, KinkForAll has always been and should always be 100% free and open to the public. We should be striving to create as public and diverse an atmosphere as possible, even in privately-owned spaces (such as the previous venues of LGBT community centers and universities).

Sadly, it turns out that even in otherwise unbiased communities, many people are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that certain other people might want or should be able to participate. In particular, although many people seem to be championing the unconference’s “open to the public” nature, some of these same people have voiced strong concern over the possible presence of minors. Others have gone so far as to wish to restrict the presence of youth citing “inappropriateness” and fears that access to sexuality information could be traumatic.

I believe these are well-intentioned people, but feel that their desire to censor information from minors or create restrictions that hinder the accessibility of some information to them is adultist behavior. Such behavior, while likely spawned from understandable fears, encourages closeted behavior. Projecting a mentality of fear onto young people does them a severe disservice.

When I was an adolescent, it would have changed my life for the better to be able to be in a public, safe place where people discussed sexuality freely, where I didn’t need to hide behind the glow of my computer screen in a dark room to get information about sex, bisexuality, and everything else that sexuality touches. I was a closeted teenager. Today, most teens and younger people are similarly closeted. Indeed, most adults still are, too!

When I was in the closet, I was being secretive, I felt fearful, and I had few to zero avenues for acquiring accurate information that could have helped me live a dramatically happier, more self-sufficient life. Put simply, the closet is not a safe place to be. In a conversation I had with David Phillips, co-founder of the Rainbow Response Coalition fighting against intimate partner violence in the Washington, DC metro area LGBT communities, David notes this startling point about the closet:

If you consider that intimate partner violence, when they look at statistics in a large population, race isn’t a determining factor, income isn’t a determining factor. But what [does] pop up as determining factors: disability is a predisposing factor, and then I believe that the closet is weighing more heavily because that is one unique form of violence that’s used against LGBT people that isn’t available to be used against heterosexual folks, is, “I’m going to out you. I’m going to tell your family. I’m going to tell your friends. So shut up.” […] It could be, y’know, kink interest, for what it’s worth, but just some characteristic that’s kept under wraps becomes a source of strength for the abuser.

(Skip to about 1:07:22 in the audio recording of the conversation to hear the quote.)

Indeed, since information and knowledge is power, censorship can be a weapon. Becky Knight summed up the importance of making sexuality information accessible to youth better than anyone:

It’s kind of amazing to me that so many people wish they had better information and guidance when they were young, but then they fail to provide it for the next generation. Information about sex and relationships is critical for young people if they are going to grow into sexually healthy and happy adults. Some people can find it on their own, but many people suffer from misinformation and misunderstandings that could have been helped by simply getting accurate information earlier on.

Fortunately, human beings are blessed (and cursed) with an ability to do something truly extraordinary: we can imagine ourselves in a situation better than the one we find ourselves in. We can hope. Despite the obviously gendered language, George Bernard Shaw seems to have understood this when he said:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

I’ve been obsessed with this idea for as long as I can remember. For instance, although many people thought it was “unreasonable” of me, as a 2^nd grader, to insist that traditional schooling was wildly inappropriate for my education, I have always thought and continue to believe that vocalizing my opinion was the most natural, obvious, reasonable thing in the world for me to do. I campaigned (for nearly 10 years) to convince my legal guardians and other adults that I would be better served if I spent my time learning on my own, out of school. Eventually, with no small effort, I dropped out, and every concern the caring but misguided adults had about me was proven unrealistic. I never “got into trouble” with drugs or gangs or violence, I became financially self-supporting while still a teenager, and—still without a GED—I’m now in a higher tax bracket than my parents are. (The price of “success,” I guess. Oh well.)

Why was it so difficult for the adults in my life to trust me when I assured them, “Don’t worry, I’ll be okay,” or to give me a straight answer when I asked, “Why can’t I study what I want to learn?” Why was my input so cavalierly dismissed? Was it because I was 7 years old? Maybe it was because they didn’t believe a 7 year old was capable of imagining himself in a better situation than the one he was in. At least, surely not better than a situation they could imagine for him, right? Wrong. Tragically wrong.

In a recent blog post on youth engagement at schools, Adam Fletcher writes:

The evidence that education systems across the United States are devoid of student involvement in decision-making is obvious to any young person or adult who considers themselves an ally of youth. […T]he belief that students cannot make decisions for themselves is as much a hindrance as the belief that students cannot make decisions for schools at large.

Here’s some food for thought: there’s a word for minors who are legally able to make their own choices. That word is ‘emancipated.’ In other words, most minors are not emancipated. This word might sound familiar, since it’s in the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed African-American slaves from the legal control of their owners across the United States.

When I think about this, I can’t help but be reminded of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says (paraphrased),

Every man, woman, and child on Earth is born free and equal in dignity and rights. We have reason and conscious and should be friendly towards one another. Everyone is entitled to the rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights regardless of age[…]. You have the right to live in freedom and safety. Nobody has the right to treat you as their slave. The law is the same for everyone. You have the right to think what you want and say what you like, to organize peacefully, [and] to take part in your country’s political affairs. The society in which you live should help you to develop. Education should strive to promote peace and understanding among all people.

(Here’s the original text of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.)

People who have not yet reached the age of majority, which varies wildly across regions, cultures, and governments, by the way, are arguably the single most disenfranchised group of human beings. In America, and in most if not all countries in the world, they have little or no legal standing, protections, or rights. Just for a moment, imagine what kind of priority adults might make education and childcare if schoolchildren could vote.

My struggle for a voice to educate myself in the way I saw best is not even worthy of a footnote when compared to the overwhelming injustices some other young people face, but it’s a personal reminder that I was once considered incapable and unreasonable thanks only to the inherent characteristic of my age at the time—something I was powerless to change.

At the same time as all of that was going on in my life, when I turned 9, I entered puberty and began to masturbate. As unfamiliar as masturbation was, I was largely well-prepared for it because I had spent countless hours at school surreptitiously reading anatomy textbooks during my Judaic Studies courses (and getting in trouble for doing so). By then, I could not only name most components of human genitalia, but could also describe the human sexual response cycle from start to finish.

I dared not speak about these things to anyone, however, because all it would do was get me in trouble for not paying more attention in school during class. Then, when I was 10, my family got an America Online account. I discovered the Internet and, of course, pornographic websites.

I was afraid to hit the “I am over 18 years of age” button when I wasn’t and yet I did so anyway. I remember learning about the public BDSM scene in New York when I was 10 and wishing I could go. I couldn’t, of course, and so I waited for 8 years—consciously, silently waiting for 8 years. I finally went out to the public BDSM scene when I was 18, and I was terrified. The places where I ended up were not, in fact, places where I think I would have been safe as a teenager. Indeed, I question how safe I was as an “adult” there. Frankly, I hesitate to return to some of those places to this day, and I’m 25 now.

A KinkForAll unconference, however, is a place I think that, had it existed and I knew about it when I was a teenager, I would have come out to because it is public, because it is safe, because it is expressly not eroticized.

So it was not so long ago when I was banned from sexuality communities for being too young. I wanted to learn about sexuality from people who were willing to talk about it with me, not engage in it with me. I wanted to learn more about myself so much that I devoured every resource I could get my hands on—not an easy feat (even in the 90’s) considering how censored everything is, especially where younger people are concerned, and it’s only getting more difficult as filtering technologies “improve.”

I fully believe that I would have been a suicide case had it not been for the miniscule amount of information about sexuality that I found. As Ramon Johnson points out in his article about LGBT suicide,

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth are up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers, according to the Massachusetts 2006 Youth Risk Survey. A 2007 San Francisco State University Chavez Center Institute study shows that lgbt and questioning youth who come from a rejecting family are up to nine times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. And for every completed suicide by a young person, it is estimated that 100 to 200 attempts are made (2003 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey).

(By the way, if you or someone you know is feeling down right now, please read and share Kate Bornstein’s Hello, Cruel World Lite.)

I desperately needed sexuality information that I could relate to, that told me I was not alone, that told me there were people I could speak with, that gave me hope that, one day, I could reach out to people who cared a damn about what I was feeling and who could share their own feelings and opinions with me. I needed someone to do that for me when I was 12, and I never got it.

I never got it because talking about it was taboo. My schools, my teachers, my parents, and even my trusted adult friends would not talk to me about it. I suspect they must have been afraid of the very things I sense some people who wish to restrict the access of minors to the educational KinkForAll unconferences are afraid of. It was that fear of theirs that almost killed me. Finding information about sexuality in public libraries and on the Internet very literally saved my young, questioning, and very isolated life. I don’t want any other young person to go through the isolation and uncertainty I felt about my own sexuality that I did at that age.

Like the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights implies, I believe that safe and free access to accurate, non-judgmental information about human sexuality and sexual freedom—or about anything of public interest, for that matter—is a fundamental human right, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic class, educational level, or age. That’s why I strongly believe that we need to make sexuality information freely accessible to young people. Adults must bear in mind that youth are a crucial group of people for whom education and access to quality, reliable information is perhaps more paramount for the future than anything else.

Knee-jerk and fearful reactions to young people’s potential exposure to sexuality material is often vastly more damaging than the exposure itself. Furthermore, a distinction must be drawn between the erotic and the educational. In fact, most current laws clearly recognize this distinction and expressly preclude material having a bona fide scientific, educational, governmental, artistic, news, or other similar justification from legal prosecution. It’s a sorry state of affairs that pornography has become the largest source of sexuality information due mostly to the absence of real, widespread, public sex education.

The result of such an information deficit about sex coupled with fearful reactions about filling it are youth that aren’t going to be able to feel safe exploring the world, their relationships with friends when they are young, and their romantic relationships when they grow older. As Cory Silverberg recently wrote in his guide to talking to kids about pornography,

Good sex education isn’t about forcing one agenda or another on your kids. It’s about being responsive to questions asked and anticipating what kinds of information your kids might need given their environment.

If I could only give you one reason why you should at least think about talking to your kids about pornography it’s that, if statistics are to be believed, they are likely to encounter some [porn] before they reach an age where they’ll be able to critically understand what they are seeing.

I wouldn’t recommend raising the topic of pornography out of the blue. But if you have a child who is already online or watches TV, or you have any pornography in your home (no matter how well hidden you think it is) I do think it behooves you to prepare to talk about pornography, and think ahead about how you want to talk about.

Concerns that exposure to pornography could be traumatic for people—regardless of age—who are not able to critically understand what they are seeing are not unfounded. Of course, the same can be said about exposure to electricity (“Don’t stick your hand in the wall outlet!”) or heat (“Don’t touch the stove when it’s on!”) or crossing the street (“Always hold my hand when you cross!”) or a bazillion other things that could potentially cause harm. However, in all of these cases, censorship does not provide protection, education does. By the same token, actively restricting access to sexuality information (not porn, but sexual education resources—there’s a difference) from people who seek it, again regardless of age, is like forcing them to wear a blindfold while crossing a highway.

How would you feel if someone did that to you? That’s how I felt throughout my entire childhood and teenage years, first in school when I was a boy, then at the restriction of sexuality information when I was going through puberty. Why did the adults in my life not see that what they thought they were doing “for my own good” was actually a painful and damaging experience for me? That when they saw fit to decree what I “needed” they were actually disrespectfully disregarding my input about my own personhood, a personhood that, even as a young boy, was extremely well-established.

Why? Adults routinely speak on behalf of young people without any input from them. Again, why? Why did the adults, institutions, and public systems in my life deny my rights to better my own education? Was it “unreasonable” of me to expect better treatment than that? Did they think I simply couldn’t learn on my own? That I “needed” their specific brand of structure? That smells a little One True Way™ to me.

And, even more upsetting, why should things feel that way for so many people, of all ages, about many topics, in countless places around the world? Can’t we do better than this? Don’t you also hope, as I do, that one day we will do better?

Thankfully, the other extraordinary thing about human beings is that we have the capability to turn our ideas, our hopes, and our dreams into realities. In 2006, high school student Miranda Elliot campaigned with 50 other young adults to reform public sex education in Chicago public schools, and they did. Mel Rose Dingal, young activist participating in the 2009 Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health Rights, successfully changed the conference’s official statement regarding youth, creating one of the strongest youth statements calling policy makers from governments, private sectors, and civil society to actively address sexual rights and reproductive health of young people as a global goal.

The KinkForAll unconferences are not youth sexual rights events because, as an unconference, KinkForAll has no specific sexuality focus. Whoever participates are the right people. Whatever the topics are, they are the right ones. Neither myself nor, as far as I know, anyone else in the KinkForAll community wishes to recruit any specific individual to the unconference.

All I want is to maintain the accessibility of the event so it is available to any member of the human race who wants to participate. Again, KinkForAll always has been and should always remain 100% free and open to the public. All that being said, you can bet on my giving a presentation at KinkForAll Washington DC about youth sexual rights, because it’s an extremely important topic not only to me personally, but I think also to our children’s future.

If you’re interested in helping out, please consider crossposting the message below on your blog, sending it to any email lists you belong to that accept such messages, tweeting about it, or just telling a friend you think might be interested in checking it out. Thank you.

PLEASE COPY AND CROSSPOST THIS MESSAGE FREELY.

KinkForAll is an ad-hoc educational unconference about the convergence of sexuality with the rest of life for anyone and everyone. It is 100% free and open to the public. Anyone with the desire to learn or with something to contribute is welcome and invited to participate.

Vitals
======
What: A free and highly social day of sexuality education and discussion.
Why: To inspire a creative, interactive and open environment where everyone feels comfortable talking and learning about all things that sexuality relates to in their lives.
When: November 21^st, 2009 at 10:30 AM
Where: Montgomery County Executive Office Building at 101 Monroe Street, Rockville, MD (5 min walk from Rockville Metro station)
Who: Everyone
How much: FREE (as in beer as well as freedom)

Details
=======

KinkForAll is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people of all persuasions to share and learn in an open environment. It is a fast-paced event with discussions, presentations, and interaction from all participants. (It is inspired by the BarCamp community.)

ANYONE WITH SOMETHING TO CONTRIBUTE OR WITH THE DESIRE TO LEARN IS WELCOME AND INVITED TO JOIN. When you attend, be prepared to share with others. When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

A KinkForAll is a special kind of gathering because there are no spectators, only participants. Attendees must give a talk or a presentation, help with one, or otherwise contribute in some way to support the event. This is called sharing and we like it. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen—there are no pre-scheduled presentations or keynote addresses. The people present at the event will select the presentations they want to see.

Anyone can lead a session, on any topic related to sexuality. You do not necessarily have to teach a new skill or idea. You might share an experience, facilitate a discussion, or read a poem. The goal is to start a conversation, make connections (and maybe even friends), and exchange knowledge. Presentations promoting specific commercial products or companies are discouraged.

Learn more about what to expect at
http://wiki.kinkforall.org/WhatToExpect

Learn more about the event guidelines at
http://wiki.kinkforall.org/TheRulesOfKinkForAll

This activity is not sponsored by, associated with, or endorsed by Montgomery County Public Schools or Montgomery County Government.

Get Involved
============

We need your help in spreading the word. Please help by participating.

Here’s how:

1. Get excited by reading fellow participants’ topic ideas on
http://wiki.kinkforall.org/KinkForAllWashingtonDC
2. Add your name or handle to the list of participants
3. Join the mailing list and introduce yourself by emailing
kinkforall@googlegroups.com
4. Show up!

Still have questions? Read the Frequently Asked Questions at
http://wiki.kinkforall.org/FrequentlyAskedQuestions

or email kinkforall@googlegroups.com for more details.

KinkForAll Online
==============

Participate online before the event at your favorite social networking web site:

Homepage: http://wiki.KinkForAll.org
Google: http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall
Twitter: http://twitter.com/KinkForAll
Identica: http://identi.ca/kinkforall
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/KinkForAll/40066342762
Fetlife: http://fetlife.com/groups/2962

All organizational efforts are coordinated in public via the mailing list. Join for free and help turn ideas into realities!

http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall

Tagged with: education, KFADC, KinkForAll, sexuality, youth

Comments (35)

Friday, October 2, 2009

Don’t you fret, sexism is alive and well in BDSM

Category labels: Beginner BDSM, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Sexism, Stupid dominants

One of the most frustratingly ignorant arguments for why BDSM is a Bad Thing comes from self-proclaimed feminists who view women who enjoy a submissive sexuality as traitors. My understanding is that such feminists believe that an imbalance of sexual power, most of which they see as being in the hands of men (while annoyingly refusing to describe which men), is the root of all activity that oppresses women. Their solution, then, seems to be to disentangle power from sex, making expressions of sexuality socially acceptable only when their physical manifestations are wholly egalitarian.

Unfortunately, although this sounds good to many people, by focusing on the physical acts of sex, what these people are actually advocating is discrimination based on one’s choice of sexual activities. That doesn’t strike me as a very noble goal at all. A great example is the endless blowjob debate: Is the act of orally pleasuring a partner inherently submissive?

If you answered yes, can you please explain to me why women are being submissive when they give a man a blowjob but not necessarily being submissive when they give him a kiss? Both activities are manifestations of potentially (but not necessarily) sexual desire that use a woman’s mouth and lips. I recall reading a study (and now fail to locate the source; damnit; can anyone with Google-fu out there find this?) showing that 30% of a typical person’s ability to sense arousing sexual stimuli is clustered around their mouth and lips. Regardless of whether that’s true or not, would you agree that kissing can be physically stimulating for the person actively doing the kissing? If so, why would this not be true for fellatio? Do you really think kissing the skin of a person’s penis makes that much of a neurochemical difference than kissing the skin of their lips? It’s no wonder so many people enjoy making out and giving their lovers head.

Everyone—including feminists—who incorrectly couples physical activity with emotional intent like this is doing exceptional amounts of damage to the realization of sexual equality. They are forgetting a fundamental truth of Ethics: equality is not interchangeable with sameness. If you treat two different people in an identical fashion, without regard to the context each individual is in and without consideration of their personal motivations, are you really treating them fairly?

Riddle me this, anti-BDSM feminists: Is your goal to establish an allowable set of sexual activity or is it to empower everyone to choose what activities—not necessarily sexually motivated activities, mind you—they would like to partake in, free of social, political, gendered, racial, and other barriers to the pursuit of their own happiness?

Now, while you’re chewing on that, despite the fact that I think feminists, if not feminism, who are rife with extreme opposition to consensual power exchange and BDSM activities is unfortunate, I’m actually pretty empathetic to them. Sadly, such fierce opposition to What It Is That We (in the BDSM communities) Do is not hard to understand if you’ve seen even one glimpse of the sexist assholery I’ve witnessed coming from significant segments of the BDSM community.

Oh yes, don’t you fret, radical feminists, I agree that sexism is alive and well in many people’s understanding of BDSM, if not also their practice of it. ::shudder:: That said, I don’t think inheriting indefensible ideals of sexism by lazily flipping the genders around is anything other than bad logic.

Without a doubt, the most blatant recent example of what I see as indefensible sexist beliefs coming from someone involved in the BDSM community was expressed by a man named Rob, who co-hosts a podcast called The Oh Team (…ew…really? Reminds me of that guy in Office Space making his “oh face”), when he appeared as a guest on episode 2 of the This Week in Kink podcast. I raised a stink about it over on MaleSubmissionArt.com, which I’ll quote:

Our species is fantastically diverse, so collectively we embody myriad dichotomies: tall and short, women and men, dark-skinned and light-skinned, hairless and hairy, and dominant and submissive, are just a few. Human diversity is so vast, in fact, that it’s impossible to infer any given person’s makeup in one sphere (say, D/s) from their makeup in another (say, gender) with 100% accuracy.

Nevertheless, many people often attempt to do just that and end up acting in extremely discriminatory ways, such as the example of Rob in Episode 2 of the This Week In Kink podcast (produced by, surprisingly, the same people who run FetLife.com), with this astonishingly sexist remark:

“I firmly and strongly believe that it is a woman’s role to be submissive to a man. I believe that submission in men is taught at conception because as soon as women realize that they’re pregnant, they start planning that child’s fucking future and quite often that the mother is definitely the beginning of the emasculation. That said, I think that women in the past couple of hundred years have gotten entirely too high on their own power and eventually need to be slapped in the fucking head and put in their place.”

(Skip to 34 minutes and 32 seconds for the quote.)

This is the kind of thing many dominant men say that makes me want to puke and—I might add—to which I would quite reasonably respond with an anti-BDSM mindset if I were not a submissive man myself. Since I am, the idea that “women in the past couple of hundred years have gotten entirely too high on their own power” seems ridiculous to me, because I’m constantly facing a world in which I get handed the bill in restaurants if I’m eating out with a woman, in which I’m unfairly expected to be the pursuing partner in a flirtatious conversation, in which I’m rarely encouraged to feel beautiful, in which I’m granted unbelievable privilege in my professional work. (I’m a male programmer. Here’s what I don’t have to deal with.) Beyond that, the fact that I’m submissive and a man seems to signal implicit permission for others to ridicule or sissify me, and ignore my desires.

What reality do some dominant men inhabit that they think women-at-large “need to be…put in their place”? Sounds to me like they are pretty well entrenched where these men want them to be already. What ruffles my feathers, however, is this: by pigeonholing women into submissive positions (in any sphere, not just sexual ones), these men not only obstruct the equal opportunity that should be afforded to women, but they also obstruct the very same right to equal opportunity for other men.

In other words, there will never be the opportunity for anyone, regardless of D/s inclination, to freely choose how they would like to experience consensual power exchange without gender equality. Many people in both the feminist and the BDSM communities consistently fail to correctly recognize the interactions that power has with sex. In the case of the former, specific activities are assumed to relate to a power exchange, perhaps thanks to cultural scripts that are played ad-nauseum such as those in mainstream pornography. In the case of the latter, gender insensitivity contributes to a belief system that actualizes sexist behavior without regard for personal choice (and that’s why outspoken women like Bitchy Jones are so spot-on so often).

In one of the followup posts over Rob’s sexist remarks, Delilah expressed my sentiments very well, if strongly worded:

I’m disgusted by the tendency in a certain type of male dom to believe that they are simply bringing back the good old days by making women subservient the way God intended. Aren’t we supposed to be progressive? Isn’t the point of alternative sexuality to explore, well, alternatives??

And get a load of the comments over there. Don’t get me started on the whole “I have a right to my opinion and you have the right to yours” crap. Free speech is free speech, and this fuckwad has the right to say whatever he likes, just as I do. But to hide behind free speech, to say that you will “fight to the death” next to me to defend my right to have an opinion, too, when in the same breath you’re saying that I’m a second-class human being, is completely disingenuous. It wasn’t so long ago that women didn’t have the right to an opinion—whether in matters of state or in the home. You can’t have it both ways, asshole.

[…]

Much more of this, and I’ll be as bitter and angry as people seem to think darling Maymay is. Nice job, kink community.

What’s worse, such ignorance is not restricted to anti-BDSM radical feminists and parts of the BDSM community. Professionals like lawyers and politicians come to similarly ignorant conclusions, I think, because they haven’t the necessary understanding either of gender or consensual power exchange.

Well, fuck! Wouldn’t you say coming to ill-conceived conclusions about things like how our bodies work, how our legal system should work, and how our governments should be structured, not to mention how technical societal infrastructure should be built, is a problem for our society? I think that’s worth fixing.

I have a great deal of respect for John and Tonja, the hosts of This Week in Kink. Nevertheless, I’m saddened by the ignorance about how issues of power intersect with issues of sexuality some of their asshat mandom guests have displayed. I also feel that anyone with an audience of several hundred thousand, such as that of the FetLife.com membership, has a social obligation to accurately portray the distinctions and details of What It Is That We Do and to combat misconceptions about it, such as deeply-engrained sexist ideals, whenever they arise with at least equal vigor as the misconception was presented with.

Which is what I told them when, to John and Tonja’s immense credit, they actually invited me to come onto the show for episode 8. Skip to 6 minutes and 10 seconds in for that part, although I’d love your feedback about the entire conversation. Also, as an aside, I’m looking forward to This Week In Kink getting more submissive men on the show (and maybe even some gay, lesbian, and transgendered people as well, which TTBOMK, are also missing), as are some others, it seems. Once again I find myself alone, for the time being.

Naturally, John and Tonja have a right not to do what I’d like them to. And, of course, how easy for me to tell them what to do. That’s why, because I don’t like it when people just talk and don’t do, and since I’ve been intending to do this for ages anyway, I (re)started my own podcast, one that specifically addresses these issues and ties them into my agenda to make the intersection of power and sex and the way it impacts everyone, not just “kinky people,” more apparent to the world at large. It’s called Kink On Tap.

Kink On Tap 1 through 7 were made way back in 2007—a lot can happen in two years. Also, I’ve never produced a podcast before so I’m excited to be learning about the craft and eager to hear feedback. What do you think?

Comments (32)

Monday, September 14, 2009

Freeing Sexuality Information at KinkForAll Boston

Category labels: Community, Generation gap, Kink events, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Technology, Vanilla life, Writing and blogging

This past weekend, I had a fantastic time participating in KinkForAll Boston, the first KinkForAll event held outside of New York City. By far, my favorite part about it was the incredibly astute discussions everyone was having about diversity and the importance of building bridges between sexuality-centric information and other kinds of information. I believe this topic to be so important that I changed gears from my planned presentation of “The Internet, Porn, Minors, and You,” in which I intended to discuss making sexuality safe and accessible to young people, to dedicate my presentation to the topic of spreading sexuality information for free. (I paid the price for this in lack of sleep the night before….)

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:

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 available~~is 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.

Tagged with: KFABOS, KinkForAll

Comments (5)

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Why MaleSubmissionArt.com Doesn’t Have Comments

Category labels: Male sexuality, Politics of sex, Technology, Writing and blogging

Over the past few months, I’ve been regularly updating a site called MaleSubmissionArt.com. It’s a photo blog in which I curate erotic imagery from around the Internet for a singularly directed purpose: to challenge the prevailing stereotypes of what submissive men look like, want, and feel—stereotypes that I believe actively undermine the erotic fulfillment of submissive men and anyone who likes them.

Since I began posting, Male Submission Art has gotten an unexpectedly high response from across the Internet. When I started, running Internet searches for such imagery was a frustrating prospect at best. Now, the URL itself has thousands of mentions on other web sites, as I’ve traveled across the United States I’ve been recognized by name if not by face for that site by people I don’t know, and I’ve gotten numerous private emails from people who have written to me personally expressing gratitude for the existence of the site. (That, by the way, is fucking awesome! Thank you all for your emails, even and perhaps especially those of you who simply write to say thanks.)

Many of those emails begin with an idle wondering: why can’t I write comments on the posts at MaleSubmissionArt.com itself? There are a number of reasons for this, but one reason stands above all others: because MaleSubmissionArt.com’s goal is to ~~obsolete itself~~make itself obsolete (thanks, Orlando). Now, let me explain.

I started the site because the Internet didn’t contain enough collected imagery, writing, and thought about the intersection of masculine gender roles and power exchange, specifically with regard to submissive men. Unable to easily create my own visual media surrounding that topic, I chose instead to scour the Internet’s existing pornographic content (for literally hours a day, by the way) trying to find appropriate images for the site (and if you’re moved to do so, help is appreciated). By bringing in content from elsewhere and shining a spotlight onto it, I hoped to inspire thought and discussion about the topics at hand.

But still, why no comments? With Male Submission Art, I don’t want to provide a place for such discussion, since such places already exist in the form of the noisy blogosphere, the “twitter”-verse, and real-world discussion engines like KinkForAll. I don’t want people to comment on MaleSubmissionArt.com because then that site becomes a bottleneck—a central, single source of content created by only one group of people: people who read this one site.

This seems ridiculous to me. In cyberspace, where copying is cheap, I want people to see the images, take the images and the text, and redistribute them elsewhere. I want to make a virus so contagious and so invasive to the rottenness of “femdom” monotony that the ideas and concepts I bring up on MaleSubmissionArt.com posts spread to the furthest reaches of sexuality discourse. When you start a wildfire, you want the wind to carry the fire into fuel; I want MaleSubmissionArt.com to be the kindling, not the fire. I want a wildfire so wide that it surrounds stereotypical porn producers such that they can’t help but feel the heat.

To do this, I need to spread content, not centralize it. If I make a place for people to create content on MaleSubmissionArt.com, I am mistakenly containing the wildfire. This is why I’m constantly encouraging people to copy what I write, why I’m thrilled every time I see someone quoting the site, or when I see an image that first made it onto the Internet thanks to a reader suggestion. Together, we’re raising the signal.

So again, what can you do instead of comment? Here are some suggestions:

If you have a blog—any kind of blog or web site—literally copy-and-paste the content from MaleSubmissionArt.com and paste it on your site: you are not stealing from MaleSubmissionArt.com. Then, in the same post, write your own thoughts about the image and/or the accompanying text and then be sure to include a link to the original post. By adding the link, your blog post will end up on my Internet radar and I’ll see it within a few days or a week. I prefer to comment on your posts than have you comment on mine.
If for some reason you can’t copy the content or add links, perhaps for legal restrictions such as Adrian Lang encountered in his (German) blog post (English translation), then merely the mention of the phrase “MaleSubmissionArt.com” without a link will also make it onto my Internet radar eventually. Moreover, it’s less important that you talk to me about your ideas of masculine submission and more important that you talk to others who have not yet been exposed to the notions you’re developing. If you really need my input, ping me via another channel; I’m eminently findable online.
Failing any of these options, email me at malesubmissionart@gmail.com. This is a relatively opaque communications channel, so naturally its lack of easy transparency bugs me. That said, even if I don’t reply to them all, I do still read every single email I get.

Comments (15)

Sunday, May 3, 2009

BDSM versus Kink: Nobody but your sex partner cares how you fuck

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM terminology, Community, Politics of sex

Lately I’ve been feeling as though I am a bit of a broken record. One of the things I am saying time and time again is that one of the goals I’d like to accomplish with KinkForAll is broadening the topics that the sexuality communities I’m a part of talk about. Since I happen to come from a BDSM background, the KinkForAll idea is spreading most quickly within the BDSM communities.

However, I am very concerned that the purposes of KinkForAll are not spreading nearly as quickly as the idea is. Specifically, the impetus behind KinkForAll has nothing to do with BDSM. Instead, it was about providing a space to talk about sexuality as it relates to and in the context of the broader themes of life: daily work, politics, legal issues, academic learning, technology, business development, interpersonal relationships, religion, and so on.

At KinkForAll New York City, currently the one and only event of its kind, I was heartened to see just how many presentation slots were filled with topics that were in no way directly related to the mechanics of how humans have physical sex. As I mentioned on the public mailing list,

In fact, one of the motivations behind the whole 20-minute presentations thing is to actively discourage demos, especially the typical “here’s how to hit someone” ones I see all over the place. KinkForAll as a venue can be utilized to much greater effect than most (if not all) demos can dream of doing by engaging participants cerebrally, with discussion or multimedia presentations on a variety of other, broader topics.

I encourage all KinkForAll participants regardless of locale to think outside the very narrow we-like-to-hit-people-with-stuff box.

Of course, the important question remains unanswered: why is talking within the “narrow we-like-to-hit-people-with-stuff box” such a problem? There are a few things all tangled up in this issue, so I’ll try to unravel them one at a time here (and probably in a number of upcoming blog posts). First, though, you must acknowledge that the exhibitionism with which the BDSM community still advocates for its own acceptance is totally out of whack with today’s realities. As the inimitable Gloria Brame writes in her Leather Leadership Conference 2009 keynote address,

In our push to be candid and guilt-free, have we come out a little too far? By emphasizing play at parties, or focusing on skills with toys, are we really providing education about the reality of being a BDSMer? Honestly, I love a good play party, and am not saying we should stop having fun. But beyond the people you play with, how many others need to know that you prefer a whip to a paddle or that humiliation makes you wet? At age 53, I would now much rather be known as a sadomasochist than as a dominatrix, precisely for this reason: I don’t think the straight world DESERVES to know what role I play in the bedroom. No more so, anyway, than I am entitled to know whether my mayor performs cunnilingus or my mail-carrier likes it doggie style.

One of the largest problems I see with such exhibitionistic advocacy is the “us versus them” mentality that focusing on activity rather than intentionality (for instance) traps people into. Putting it bluntly, and as Gloria Brame implied more diplomatically than I can ever do, nobody but your sex partner cares how you fuck so why does the BDSM community think that their myopic view of the world is what will garner us “tolerance” in the rest of it?

Ever since KinkForAll New York City, I’ve been doing a bit of research into the history of previous social justice movements, notably the GLBT rights movement. I think the BDSM community is currently doing a piss-poor job of steering the public discourse around what-it-is-that-we-do to our advantage. It may sound cold, but the fact of the matter is that the BDSM community has a gigantic image problem, and it is negatively affecting the way we live our daily lives.

It frustrates me when I look around my community and I don’t see anybody talking about that. And for what? Yet another boring flogging demo from your mile-long “class” list? Are you shitting me?

As she is wont to do, Emily Rutherford’s analysis of this phenomenon seems far less emotionally driven and far more academically thorough than my own:

Much as there was a time when the gay community was criticized for being overly focused simply on sexual practice, and not on larger, more abstract or theoretical questions about identity and community, so too (from what I’ve heard; I can’t speak as an insider) does the BDSM community seem to struggle with this problem. KinkForAll is addressing that, and here I think the word “kink” is actually key: I’ve come to see this word as encompassing any non-mainstream sexuality, maybe a further broadening or development or evolution of “queer.” I think we can use it that way; it’s not as if it’s a word that actually connotes a specific sexual desire or practice in the way that the B, D, S, and M of that acronym do.

Naturally, she is spot on. The B, D, S, and M of BDSM are wonderful (any regular reader of this blog knows just how much they are an intrinsic part of me), but they are a narrow, near-sighted view of sexuality that it behooves the BDSM community itself to break out of. And I mean now.

As KinkForAll New York City showed, the KinkForAll format and method has the power to radically reframe the public discourse around sex, gender, and sexuality away from the notion that people who practice BDSM or any non-mainstream sexuality are not normal, that we are fundamentally different from vanilla people, and towards an ideal of sexual equality regardless of activity. It should not matter that some men like to tie girls up or that I like to be tied up when I get fucked because nobody fucking cares except my sex partners, which is exactly how it should be.

It’s certainly important that there are people, like me, who openly, honestly, and publicly make ourselves and our sex lives visible to other people. I am in no way discounting the work of countless sex-positive advocates in prior generations who worked towards the appropriate representation of the kind of sex we want to have and distinction from the kind of sex other people have. As Sascha wrote recently,

it’s natural to want to feel different or special. I know that I’ve been guilty of using kink as a way to establish my otherness, to create a separation between me and the “vanilla” world.

But as Sascha also notes, creating an opaque separation between us and “the ‘vanilla’ world” is to be trapped in a ridiculous and unhelpful “us versus them” mentality that only serves to distance (consensual) BDSM activities away from the mantle of human rights.

I can’t help but be reminded of one of my favorite Little Britain characters, Daffyd Thomas, the only gay in the village. He goes around declaring his otherness and creating his own persecution, even though it seems that the rest of the village is bi-curious at the very least.

This is why it is not only helpful, but critically vital that KinkForAll does not become a BDSM-centric space, why sexuality-neutral venues (such as universities and local community centers) are far superior for KinkForAll events over dungeons and swinger clubs. This is why the whole thing is called KinkForAll and not BDSMForAll in the first place! Not that there’s anything wrong with adapting the KinkForAll model and creating a smaller, more BDSM-centric additional space. I’d go to that, too, I just don’t want to lose the broader diversity.

As I said on the netcast audio about KinkForAll that I recorded with Axe on his MasoCast, people who are not a part of sexuality communities and who do not have an awareness of the intricacies of our vocabulary use “kink” and “kinky” to apply to any non-mainstream sexual idea. We therefore must broaden the discussion and our use of the word so that we stop training people who’ll listen to respond with reactions like, “It’s all whips and chains and I’m not into any of that!”

The BDSM community is so focused on these, like, extreme sports-style skill sets that we forget, often, that’s not necessarily the most important thing… especially for people who need to know more about the world in which we live in [in order] to come out to our world.

This is why I want to see lawyers present on obscenity law at KinkForAll. This is why I want to see gender studies students debate gender theory at KinkForAll. This is why I want to see artists discuss sexuality in art at KinkForAll. This is why I want to see hackers showcase awesome technologies at KinkForAll. This is why I want to see community leaders leading by example at KinkForAll. This is why I want to see sex workers teaching skills for self-protection at KinkForAll.

Having all of this other stuff, this stuff-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-hitting-people-as-part-of-sex, does not negate the usefulness of having a Spanking 101 presentation (for example), but I can guarantee that not having all this other stuff will make a Spanking 101 presentation totally fucking useless.

So please, not just when you unorganize local KinkForAll events, but also when you go to local group meetings, talk to your friends, family, and peers, please remember to engage with them rather than separate yourself from them. The people in the rest of the world are not our enemies, unless we fail to make them our allies.

Tagged with: KinkForAll

Comments (14)

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

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

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

3. Engage opponents in constructive dialogue.

Monday, February 8, 2010

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Sunday, December 13, 2009

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