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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Years pass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She wasn’t even aiming for me.

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

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

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

—“Creep“

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

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite feeling severely out of place for most of the conference because of the über-academic surroundings, I still had a really good time! I recorded the multi-media portion of the presentation I gave at my panel session, a video of which and the (mostly-accurate) transcript is below.

For those who are coming here after meeting me, attending, or hearing about our session at the conference, I hope you’ll take the time to follow the links in the hypertext transcript below. For those of you who are already familiar with my work, most of this piece will seem like glimpses of highly self-referential previous work. That’s intentional; I met so many new people in so many various fields and, moreover, I knew that I would, that I purposefully composed what essentially amounts to a mash-up of my own previous writing and thinking on these topics, distilled as much as possible to fit within the 10 minute time limit I was given.

As you may know, I’m really disillusioned with the majority of the sexuality subculture and its willful ignorance. Traveling outside of the sex-positive filter bubble is thus a high priority, despite its difficulty and the fears it raises for me, personally. The Public Anthropology Conference was a challenge in some ways, but it was also hugely rewarding in others.

Part of me wants to sit down and write a longer post about my experience here, the conversations I’ve had, and the fascinating people I met. But in light of relatively very little sleep these past few days and the stress of travel, I’ve only got the energy to offer you the link to my #PAC2011 hashtag stream. Thank you to everyone who was there, and especially the kind volunteers who helped me get and stay connected to the Internet with guest Wi-Fi access! :)

And now, without further ado, my presentation! As usual, all original material is Creative Commons licensed. Feel free to download the presentation in any of the following formats:

• Dreaming of Compassion: Technology, Polyamory, and Social Justice keynote presentation as a ZIP archive.
• Dreaming of Compassion: Technology, Polyamory, and Social Justice keynote presentation as a PDF document.
• Dreaming of Compassion: Technology, Polyamory, and Social Justice keynote presentation as a text transcript.

I want a new American Dream. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I think that we could build it, if we try together, because we live in an amazing moment in history.

As I bet any sexually vocal person will tell you, the Internet has fundamentally transformed our ability to communicate with one another. For example, before the Internet, if you were a gay teenager in bum-fuck nowhere, you were the only gay person in the world. Now, though, after the Internet, if you’re a gay teenager in bum-fuck nowhere, you’re one of millions of gay teenagers communicating online.

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

The Internet is such a big deal that it’s actually a revolution of all kinds—media, governance, technology itself. But it’s also a second sexual revolution, and this one—our generation’s sexual revolution—traces its roots through the first. This is where just a bit of history comes in handily.

On May 9th, 1960, the first oral contraceptive was made available to the general public; “the Pill” sparked the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Like all revolutions, no one could predict the outcome at the outset. It sparked chaos; the sexual revolution precipitated the “sex wars” in the 1980s.

Also in the 1960s—in 1962 to be exact—Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, affectionately known as “Lick,” (not kidding) first proposed a global network of computers. The project was initially adopted by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an R&D branch of the US military.

As the slogan “Make Love, Not War” spread through public consciousness in the “free love” movement of the 60s, the Internet was being recognized as a tool of generic utility and in 1969 was launched as ARPANet. “Make love, not war” is, at least poetically, a physical parallel of Internet technology.

A specification for the ubiquitous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) was published in 1973—the same year as the Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion in America. In 1986, as the sex wars raged, the National Science Foundation funded NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps Internet backbone for expressly non-commercial, essentially academic purposes. The protocol for the World Wide Web, called the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), was developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, and, of course, eventually became the most widely used protocol on the public Internet.

In the same way as Gutenberg’s printing press was recognized as a revolution, bringing with it 150 years of chaos, so too is the Internet. Before the printing press, countries were kingdoms. The invention of the printing press around the year 1440 essentially signalled the start of the end of a feudal Western social order, culminating in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which brought forth a new system of political order to Europe and, with it, the modern concept of nation states. What might replace today’s countries in 150, or even just 50 years from now?

These histories highlight the intersections of and tensions between technology, culture, and policy. Moreover, hegemonic preconceptions are especially insidious when they make their way into technology. The same-sex marriage debate illustrates this when, for instance, clerks in many jurisdictions maintaining matrimony databases try to record a new marriage and the computer systems they use ask them “Which one’s the wife?” This unintentional antipathy to the diversity of human identities and relationships, which is literally encoded into society’s infrastructure, is perhaps the greatest silent threat to our species’ survival.

Schemes for a marriage database completely free of gender and sexuality assumptions do exist. Sam Hughes’s example permits any human to marry any other human any number of times and have any number of partners simultaneously. Now, if you tried to use a schema like his, you’d actually be forced to write tons of application layer logic to enforce the legal restrictions that are placed on marriage today; our technology already offers us capabilities that are beyond our society’s understanding of the social constructs and contracts many people have and are using right now.

The Dalai Lama once said, “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” But today, as environmentalist and author Paul Hawken observed, “goods seem to have become more important, and are treated better, than people.” Faced with the existential threat of this mounting tension, our species will be forced to shoulder the challenge that political advisor Jeremy Rifkin imagines we can accomplish: “extend our empathy to the entire human race as an extended family, and to our fellow creatures as part of our evolutionary family, and to the biosphere as our common community,” or perish.

Thus, the urgent question is: how do we do that? As it happens, today’s polyamory movement is uniquely situated at an ideological and technological intersection illuminating a possible answer. Polyamory’s key tenet—that a relationship involving more than two individuals is a good and valuable thing—is so powerful because it is so simple. To understand why, we can look to the Internet.

In his seminal work, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World, technology theorist Kevin Kelley wrote, “In the network economy, the more plentiful things become, the more valuable they become.” From a polyamorous perspective, one could say, “Love is not a scarce commodity,” or, even more generally, “the more, the merrier.”

As I see it, a poly activists’ core goal can be succinctly described as achieving equality in relationship choice. That is, polyamorous people recognize that the structure of a compulsorily monogamous relationship, in which one individual is connected to only one other individual, is limiting. Instead, we argue, many people may find more value by changing the structure such that one individual can be connected to more than one other individual.

This has some remarkable parallels to the way telecommunication technologies (like the Internet) work. In essence, polyamory does for relationships what digital telecommunication technologies have done for ideas. Here’s how veteran web designer John Waters explained it:

In the industrial economy, scarcity established value. Natural resources such as oil, gold, and diamonds were scarce and therefore considered valuable. […] Paul Romer and other theorists introduced the “New Growth Theory”. In this model, the principle of scarcity is turned upside down.

The new theory essentially divides the world into two productive inputs: “things” and “ideas”. Only one person at a time can use things such as a hammer, a telephone, a lawnmower, or a car. On the other hand, ideas can be used by many people simultaneously, i.e., recipes, blueprints, formulas, methodologies, and software. They can be used to rearrange things. They can be copied, shared, and connected, thereby leading to more ideas. “Economic growth,” Romer says, “arises from the discovery of new recipes and the transformation of things from low to high value configurations.”

Such “transformation of things from low to high value configurations” is what the polyamory movement does with regard to relationships. The most obvious limitation with the often-monogamous notion of “true love” is that it creates a scarcity model, and free distribution is anathema to maintaining scarcity. Polyamorous people understand that “free love” is not just a hippie slogan, it is a way to create real-world emotional value.

It is now our words, in the form of programming languages, that are driving the evolution of technology. The corpus of this technological literature changes our physical reality, offering us everything from hormone therapies to space shuttles to online social networks.

Meanwhile, those same social networks offer fertile soil where non-mainstream perspectives—and new languages—can take root. As Wired columnist Regina Lynn wrote, “Beyond the obvious benefits of online community, the language’s Internet-speed evolution continues to give polyamory a boost. When poly or poly-curious people stumble across the polyamorous lexicon, the discovery can help validate their worldview.”

The introduction of new language—both terms and techniques for communication itself—is a profound change. In the words of asexuality activist David Jay, “By finding new ways to talk about relationships we can greatly increase our options for forming them.” In addition to the value offered by transforming the topology of relationships, there is value in having a diversity of relationship types; even healthy monogamous people have strong friendship, co-worker, familial, and other kinds of social networks that look similar to polyamorous people’s more intimate networks.

In the early 19th century, American railways were a transportation infrastructure for commerce—a network of matter-moving devices. In the early 1990’s, the World Wide Web emerged as a general purpose infrastructure for communications—a network of idea-moving devices. Today, polyamorous and non-monogamous culture is a peer-to-peer infrastructure for the transmission of information about human relationships—a literal social network of compassion-moving devices.

This marriage of polyamorous culture with the Internet thereby accelerates the distribution of the Dalai Lama’s prophylactic prescription for humanity. Or, in other words, the success or failure of that quintessential American Dream, your “pursuit of happiness” is, at least in part, intertwined with others’ similar pursuits. As Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis observed:

“If I were always violent towards you or gave you misinformation, or made you sad, or infected you with deadly germs, you would cut the ties to me, and the network would disintegrate. So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks. Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things, like love and kindness and happiness and altruism and ideas. I think, in fact, that if we realized how valuable social networks are, we’d spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them, because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness. And what I think the world needs now is more connections.”

In the latter 20th Century, the American Dream grew up in a house with a white picket fenced porch, had a college education, and got a steady job. But today, the American Dream has increasingly been seen as a platitude veiling corporate greed. Founding director of Xavier University’s Center for the Study of the American Dream, Michael Ford, sums up the situation like this:

[T]o an astonishing degree [Americans] have lost confidence in the institutions traditionally seen as Dream guardians. […] Americans feel they are on their own but they haven’t lost the Dream. They have confidence in themselves, their families and their personal networks.

So perhaps adopting the polyamorous tenet, that goodness is inherent in social connectedness, is therefore not merely a social ideal, but also a blueprint for a 21st Century version of a re-imagined, re-invigorated American Dream.

And where better to present such an idea than here, in America’s capitol city, at American University? Thank you very much.

EDITORIAL NOTE: The following is a rush transcript of my Arse Elektronika 2011: Screw the System talk. The conference, which focused on the intersection between sex, technology, and class, and which has been thought-provoking every year I’ve attended, did not disappoint. I was posting updates through most of the conference with the #Arse2011 hashtag, and all of the talks got audio recorded. They will eventually be available from Monochrom.

I wanted to start by pointing out this quote by Antonio Negri:

Nothing is richer or finer than to be able to connect the immediate needs of individuals to the political needs of the class.

On that note, thank you to Johannes for putting this conference together.

[Applause.]

And also to Robert and Carol for hosting this space. I want to make sure I give them honor and homage, too, for allowing us to do this here. So this year’s Arse Elektronika is “Screw the System.” And, on that note I also want to thank the previous speakers who came before me, particularly the ones who were talking about the various perceptions of social constructs.

You guys are a group of people whose minds are irrepressible. You people present ideas at places like this, and hopefully in the work you do elsewhere as well, that help create a kind of psychological liberty—a kind of space for possibility in the mind. This is really, really important. You guys are rebels of today and possible prophets of the future.

Now, in contrast to that, we have “The Man.” We have “The System.” The System wishes to maintain the status quo; they encourage stagnation. And how does that work? Class. Okay, so, class generally. What is class? That’s what we’re here to talk about.

High class. Low class. What class are you in? What is your first class? When was your second class? Do you like your class mates? Can you mate cross-class? What makes you feel like a second-class citizen? Are you working class? Are you working in class? Did you even go to class today? Classy.

So, when I come to talk about this topic, you’ll have to forgive me because this is not a topic I can talk about dispassionately. And so I’m going to change the tone a little bit.

When I began to think about it, I went first to the mathematics definition, which is a set of things that are kept separate from another set of things. Now, in social contexts, social classes are also very intricately intertwined with the idea of social power. When I started thinking about that, I started to look at the work of Max Weber, who was a German sociologist and political economist in the very early 1900′s.

And he thought of class—he created this theory academically called the “three component-theory of stratification” or more commonly known as Weberian Stratification—that was founded upon these two different positions of power. On the one hand you have the possession of power, and this depends on the control of certain social resources. And [on the other], you have the exercise of power, or the ability to get one’s way, often regardless of potential opposition. So, together, the possession and exercise of power—again, social resources—conflagrate this ability to get what one wants.

So now when we talk about the sphere of sexuality, we often talk about the idea of sexual empowerment. And I think no one put this better than Kristen Stubbs, actually, when she talked about sexual empowerment from making toys. She said,

I don’t believe that off-the-shelf sex toys or equipment can meet everyone’s needs. Commercial products also tend to be very expensive, so DIY alternatives can help to make toys more accessible. Promoting technological empowerment for sexuality and pleasure is about enabling people to build and modify objects around them so they can have the kinds of experiences that they want to have.

It’s a pretty basic idea, right? You should get to have the kind of experiences you want to have. So, sexual empowerment is the ability to have the sexual experiences that one wants. Kitty [Stryker] talked about this very eloquently just recently.

Now let’s talk about that in the context of the BDSM Scene.

Now, when I say “The Scene,” I have to be very specific. I’m saying capital-T, capital-S, “The Scene.” Specifically, I’m talking about the semipublic, pansexual, often middle-class and privileged “public” BDSM Scene. In her paper, Working at Play: BDSM Sexuality in the San Francisco Bay Area, Margot Weiss defines that as such:

“Pansexual” is a term used by the SM community to describe organizations, spaces and scenes that are open to, used by, or include people of various sexual and gender orientations. In practice, the “pansexual community” in San Francisco usually means the community of practitioners who join and participate in organizations like Society of Janus and SM Odyssey, take classes and workshops in places like QSM, attend munches, and semipublic play parties, and otherwise participate in the formally organized scene[…]. In general, the men are, in the majority, heterosexual, the women are bisexual and heterosexual, and there are a fair number of transgendered practitioners and professional dominants of various orientations.

Now, [Weiss wrote] an ethnography, so she interviewed a bunch of individuals. And what I want to call out here is:

In total, I interviewed 51 practitioners: 27 men and 24 women (including two transgendered women). Their average age was 41, they were 87% white and most were involved in long-term relationships: 25% were married, and 38% were partnered. Of my female interviewees, 50% were bisexual, 29% were lesbian, and 15% were heterosexual[…]. Of my male interviewees, 59% were heterosexual, 26% were bisexual, and 15% were gay. Almost all of my interviewees would be considered middle class, based on education, profession, and income; 26% worked in the computer or tech industry, more than any other category of employment, including “other.”

So, before we get too much further it’s really key to understand this particular distinction. That when I talk about The Scene I’m specifically talking about this community of people whether they are in San Francisco or elsewhere. They have formalized structures, which I call the capital-S Scene. You can think of this—you can ask yourself some questions to see how closely associated you are with this particular group. For example:

• How many hours a week do you spend on, say FetLife and/or in BDSM email lists (discussion lists about the topic)?
• How many and which BDSM, Leather, or Scene organizations are you involved with? Do you belong to?
• What percentage of your social life would you consider to be connected to that community, to The Scene?
• How much money do you estimate do you regularly spend on BDSM-related events, or equipment, or things like that: toys, services, etc.?

It is okay if you do or do not. :)

Another way to look at it is to look around right now. Who do you not see here? I don’t see a lot of dark-skinned people, Black people. Some—only two. Disproportionately few. I don’t see a lot of people with disabilities. I don’t see a lot of “poor” people. People who could not come because this [conference] has a price tag. It’s a low price tag, which is worth congratulating you [Johannes] for but it still has a monetary cost. I know people who couldn’t be here today because they could not afford the $25 to get in the door.

Now, I’m going to talk specifically about—well, let’s mention this: look at my skin color, look at my gender presentation, which is worth noting also, that I’m not in those categories, that I’m able-bodied, etc.—but let’s put all that aside. Instead, I’m going to talk about submissive masculinity and the submissive masculine, because that’s what I most know.

In The Scene, there is a shared culture, shared news outlets, shared informational outlets, and harkening back to Adam’s talk yesterday for those who were there, this is very much like a nation-state. The collection of people for whom that realm comprises the majority of their social existence live in that particular kind of nation-state. I call this The Scene-State. Capital-S, capital-S.

The Scene-State. It is an imagined community. And like any other modern society, it enforces social control on its citizens in particular ways. And that’s what I’m really interested in.

When we think about how that happens, we can again look to Max Weber and his theory of Weberian Stratification. In it, he also discusses three individual components that comprise that kind of social control. He talks about “wealth,” which is the access to material resources, typically thought of as financial. Now, confusingly, he calls this “Class,” which is unfortunate terminology. He talks about power, more formally, political power. He calls this “Party.” And he talks about “Stande”, or Status—social status—and these things are like, “What is your gender presentation? How does that affect you socially?” We talked a lot about that already earlier [in this conference], I’m not going to go over it again.

But this can be mapped almost directly, I think, to the BDSM Scene where “wealth,” for example, is big toybags. Or leathers; the right boots. Power and Party is your Scene affiliation. How many organizations are you a part of? Are you on the Boards of any organizations? What decision making power do you have in those organizations? What political clout does that give you?

And Status? Role orientation. Top? Dom? Sub? Bottom? Femme? Masculine presenting? Now, that’s what I want to focus on because this is, of course, a class analysis of social status in the BDSM Scene. This gets very complicated because of the intersectionalities that are affected by it but the most salient way to talk about it is talk about something called domism, which is the prejudicing against submissive-identified individuals or bottom-identified individuals and towards the normalizing experiences of dominants. And Thomas Millar over at Yes Means Yes is probably the most eloquent on the topic.

He calls this “role essentialism and sexism intersectionality in the BDSM Scene.” (It’s a highly, highly recommended read.) And, basically, he calls it [out as]:

[S]ocial structures within a sexual community that privilege dominants and devalue submissives outside of explicitly negotiated power exchanges. This takes a lot of forms, among them the pathologizing of bottoms and subs; and non-play role-policing and presumption. […] What these prejudices amount to is a normalizing and centering of the experience of the dominant in The Scene.

And this is not just his say-so, it’s not just my say-so, there are numerous ethnographies, like Playing on the Edge by Staci Newmahr (a really, really good book) that talk about exactly this. And people have experienced these kinds of prejudices on an extraordinarily regular basis. In this book, Newmahr writes on page 79:

The most ubiquitous example posits assertiveness as inconsistent with submission. Once, when I articulated a point in a heated conceptual debate, a member of the group asked me whether I was sure I was a submissive. Another time I asked a companion (a top-identified man) to order my coffee while I went to the restroom, prompting another person at the table to exclaim, “Hey, I thought you were a sub!”

So, this is—this can be taken as a bunch of anecdotes from an individual perspective, but if we zoom out to the perspective of the “nation-state,” to see how the nation-state “sees” things, right, how the Scene-State views this, you can see this mirrored in a lot of ways. One of the biggest intersections is the privileging of the dominant experience as an expression of masculinity, so that masculinity itself becomes the way to express dominance, which is obviously frustrating for submissive men like me—and for dominant women, and for anyone who doesn’t match into these boxes. There’s an enormous number of cultural scripts and tropes that we can ascribe to in order to get that kind of presentation to be acknowledged.

But what I want to show you is a prototypical example of how this relates to [social class dynamics]. I run a website called MaleSubmissionArt.com. And here’s a picture that I posted on it—looks pretty tame. And I saw this as a very loving and sensuous photograph. And […] I said here, “tame photo…young couple…struck a chord in me.” […] I saw love.

And here’s what someone else said. Same exact image, pixel for fucking pixel. And here’s their interpretation of the image: “Silly boy. I may let you serve me but I’ll never love you. Is that enough?” And he says, “Yes, Mistress.”

It’s the contrast in these two things, it’s the contrast in the context, not the image, but in the surrounding marketing material in this that pisses me off. Because this is all I get most of the time when I look at porn, or when I look at sexual expression of any kind that tries to present itself as for—and made—made for me.

One of the interesting things about Male Submission Art was that it was specifically an online project. It allowed me to disentangle my embodiment with my expressions. I didn’t look a certain way, I didn’t act a certain way, and I “always pass on the Internet.” And I was able […] essentially to treat the Internet like a way to get that kind of idea and get that different presentation and that different context out into the minds of other people. It was like—to appropriate some technological terminology—it was like “impregnating The Scene’s spaces with cybernetic replication where other people’s minds,” I wrote in a post very angry about this very topic, “other people’s minds offered pre-sequenced cultural genetic material, instruments to engineer a more humane culture.”

So what I did was project my persona so thoroughly up there, on the Internet, that I forgot about being a corporeal being. To get the fucking ideas out there, to make the space in people’s minds where something like that was possible and acceptable.

This does not just affect men, or submissives, it affects pretty much everybody in various ways. Here’s a great post by Adele Haze talking about Kink, Inc.’s marketing phraseology. And one of the things she wrote about here was just taking a bunch of examples of the porn-maker’s way of selling their material:

“Sexy MILF is bound, stripped, and made to carry a mattress through the city so everyone can see what a huge whore she is!”

And then she makes some very, very poignantly sarcastic [and] quite funny remarks about that, for example:

“Tea Blondie gets fucked on the street by BIG BLACK COCK!!!” (OMG, disembodied enthnically-specific cock!)

The thing that was very good about this post, I thought, is that she called out the community of people who support this as being surprised that in their latest incarnation, a particular incident with Niki Blue’s “virginity” press release, as being surprised that this kind of stuff went on! From Kink, Inc.! Oh my god! As if it was some kind of shock. As if they hadn’t been reading this and consuming this all the goddamn time already. Every day that is the presentation. It would only shock somebody, right, if they were surprised that that could be possible. Why don’t people notice that more fully? Didn’t shock me. And it didn’t shock a lot of other people either. But few people in the community, in the Scene-State, had much to say about it.

So this presents women, for the most part, or submissive men on the other part, as worthless people. But we are not worthless individuals, we are very valuable people and the sexualities that we have are also important and valuable and highly subversive and very, very useful. We’re not “poor” people, we are rich people. And so that’s why a lot of people are very angry—very angry—at this constant refrain.

Now if you ask Scene people to fix this, they won’t, because they benefit from the rotten status quo. The fundamental issue to recognize is that people who are community leaders—and I use Kink, Inc. as an example but there are many; we can use the TES Board of Directors or any of the other organizations as well—the thing to recognize is that these Scene-State figureheads, these so-called leaders of the community, are plutocratic vampires. They are vampires because they suck the emotional vitality out of the people. They’re a phalanx of dishonest and untrustworthy people who use the instruments of Scene-State power specifically to enrich themselves—they are cronies—and exclude everybody else. Where do they get these riches? By creating wealth and social opportunities? By creating these sexual opportunities? No. They rake it off the backs of individuals like Mr. Cellophane, who you will never see: people whose only pattern for BDSM play is the fetishizing of lovelessness and exploitation that I showed you in that prototypical example. That’s not wealth creation. That’s wealth redistribution—up, towards them, towards the higher classes.

Any positive representation including simply representations, i.e., visibility, not invisibility—existing representations—is a valuable resource. It’s made scarce specifically to the most intersectionally underprivileged populace. I mentioned some of them earlier: people with disabilities, people of colour, submissive men, in this particular example. Where is fat-positive imagery? Look around you! Look here!

The Center for Sex and Culture is pretty good, generally. But still, where are the fat-positive imagery? Pictures like this: Wheelchair Worship. Where’s that? It’s never gonna be in FetLife’s Kinky & Popular feed.

[…]

So, to understand resources you have to understand poverty. Poverty: in her seminal work, Ruby K. Payne wrote—”A Framework for Understanding Poverty”—she wrote, “poverty is an extent to which an individual does without resources.” And specifically, she wrote that resources are typically thought of as financial resources but that’s just one kind of resource that people have. It’s the very obvious one, but there are also emotional resources; being able to choose and control emotional responses, especially responses to negative things. Mental resources. Spiritual resources. Physical resources. Support systems—whether institutional, or social. Knowledge of hidden rules is a resource that she notes. Knowledge of hidden rules is like the customs of a particular group of people. How do you pass in a social group? You have to have an understanding of how to work the iPad if you’re gonna pretend to be a businessman [in the middle-upper class]. But also things like, what’s the level of noise you’re used to? Poor spaces are typically very noisy and crowded. And one needs solitude and quiet to think, says Chris Hedges. It’s an important thing because the higher class you go, the more space you have, more mental and physical space you have.

And then she also talks about relationships and role models as a resource. Now, on relationships and role models, she says, “All individuals have role models.” I showed you a role model for a submissive guy—that I hated.

All individuals have role models. The question is the extent to which the role model is nurturing or appropriate. Can the role model parent? Work successfully? Provide a gender role for the individual? It is largely from role models that a person learns how to live life emotionally.

Dominant men have role models, too. Many of them talk a lot about that to me. One guy […] a 38-year-old self-identified dominant man goes to a lot of Kink [Inc.] parties, has lots of good memories there, and he says that Kink was wonderful for him, the company, because he:

…saw manifested what was always going on in my own head, which I was ashamed and scared of, and I saw that it could be done in an ethical and consensual manner.

Which is awesome.

I didn’t even recognize that I was dominant or sadistic until I saw James Mogul patterning a way to do that. Once I did, I could avail myself of the great educational opportunities that are all around us here [the Bay Area], but without it, I would likely have remained someone who thought BDSM was for people who inexplicably needed props for sex.

And then he says:

…and in true trickle-down fashion, that is why we champion it to others.

It: the education, The Scene. All sounds good. It is good that he has role models. Where are mine? Where are yours? For the most part, our iconography, the thing that is supposed to represent people like me are primarily objects of ridicule or scorn or derision—in both the overculture and the Scene-State. If we exist at all, of course.

Every time I walk into spaces I take little tallies of the images. Mission Control, June 11th: 22 women to 1 man. September 3rd: 29 women to 3 men. Image tally, SF Citadel, September 27th: 24 women, 1 man. Image tally, Wicked Grounds, July 13th: 17 women to 5 men. August 15th: 10 women to 1 man (the full numbers were 20 to 2). We are literally invisible for the most part, and it kind of reminds me of this: a comic about an “invisibility cloak”.

One could ask, “Well, what’s going on here? Why is that happening?” And, one way to think about this is not just the matter of what makes us invisible, but also what keeps us invisible? So, imagine, for example, marketing a cell phone to a homeless mom. How would you go about doing that? There’s no market for that because they’re not going to have any money to pay for your cell phone so you’re not going to figure out how to build the best homeless phone. And so, I’m gonna borrow from Alisa, actually, when she says:

This idea is interesting to me because it turns the tables on access. As much as the under served population doesn’t have access to helpful tools, designers, researchers and business people don’t have access to those populations.

How does a researcher go to a homeless mom and ask about what the best cell phone is? Where do they find those people? They’re living on the margins already so they’re difficult to see. An analogy, for example, could be food deserts: if rich people only build markets where they are, where are poor people gonna eat? (See also: Food deserts.) If only engineers who drive cars build highways, where are people who don’t drive cars gonna cross the fucking highway?

Okay, bringing this back to sex. In her article, “Perverting Visual Pleasure: Representing Sadomasochism,” Eleanor Wilksinson wrote on what she calls the “Paradox of Visibility.” On the one hand, it’s good to be visible, we want visibility, representation, etcetera. On the other hand, she writes:

Queer politics has often assumed that increased publicity automatically leads to increased acceptance, that to make a change to the ‘hetero-normative’ world order we need to take to the streets, to make our sexual practices visible[…]. However, this equation is often overly simplistic[…]; with increased visibility comes the risk of increased hostility too[…].

Fistandantilus, for example, that dominant guy, was very angry at me, ultimately. He asked why I didn’t kill myself.

We must be constantly aware that there is a very real danger of a parallel ‘SM-normativity’, in which certain (capitalist and consumerized) conceptions of SM become the norm. Already the mainstreaming of SM has led to a heteropatriarchal version of SM becoming dominant. With increased visibility there is also a danger we can begin to mistake the representation of SM for SM itself – that this is how it should and always will be. What is therefore needed is a space in which to make public a number of continuously contrasting and conflicting SM stories.

[…]

Without any publicity, minoritized sexual cultures cannot challenge and change mainstream stereotypes.

Now, Wilkinson was talking about The Scene in contrast to the vanilla world, right, the over-arching hegemony. But the same holds true for inside the Scene-State itself. Exactly the same thing holds true, again. It’s a fractal boundary. It works in very much the same way.

And it’s not just me, in fact. Here’s an example that I found really, really, really recently about people calling themselves D and M. Just two bloggers that I found, and their coming out story to BDSM is very interesting. D writes—sorry, M writes:

D’s little post about facesitting reminded me of how all this first started about two and a half years ago. We’d been dating for over a year, and we’d just started getting into male-dominated kink. Looking back, that was kind of… silly. I was still in denial about being bisexual, and about being dominant, so that combined with a week of erotic dreams after reading the Story of O made me think I wanted to be dominated. Like I said, silly.

By the way, Story of O poster, right there [on the wall in this room].

The thing was that I spent most of the time topping from the bottom. D was a sub just playing at being dominant and basically that meant I got exactly what I wanted with a pair of handcuffs and some dirty talk. Which, at the time, suited me just fine.

What set me off was the one night we were having a little playtime with an old Halloween costume of mine, and I was desperate to have my pussy eaten. D, however, was just plain horny, and wasn’t going to. At the time, I was wearing a leash and collar…

That’s right. I’m gonna let that sink in. She was wearing a leash and collar.

…and I surprised us both when I bound his hands with the leash and sat on his face until I was satisfied. Very suddenly a regular Friday night for us turned into my first dominant encounter. It was thrilling and exciting and deeply satisfying.

I’d like to say I never looked back, but I am still working on getting through all the baggage that blocked my dominant aspect in the first place. It’s complicated, but my little slut makes it soooo worth it.

Good for them.

The point here is that they were patterning what they saw first, which is totally acceptable and fine and not a bad thing in and of itself. But when it didn’t work for them, thank god they found ways to actually find something that did. And what if they didn’t? Who gets left out when there are no representations that work? They’re lucky and that is a difficult hurdle for many people to overcome.

As an example, I entered The Scene when I was 18 in New York City as a switch. And I do, sometimes, have a feeling like I would have fun topping, and I have so thoroughly felt disrespected for being a bottom, and a submissive that I said, fuck topping, I’m gonna do this. Maybe I’m a contrarian to some n-th degree, I don’t know. But it was so important for me—now, it is so important for me now to accept this for who I am today, that topping is not even in my head. And that fact also pisses me off. Because I should be able to be free enough—maybe I have to make myself free enough in some woo-woo way—to want and have that, too. And I can’t get over that, yet. Cuz, y’know, no one’s perfect; I’m not perfect.

There’s an interesting point about representation. When I was given pre-publication access to a post a friend of mine was writing about representation, she had given—who’s also here—she had given me access to take a look at the post. And one of the dominant-identified, heterosexual cismale tops who she had also given access to for his perspective, said, “I don’t know if this really makes sense. Y’know, I can name a dozen prominent submissive men in The Scene, and only, like, y’know, four or five in the inner circles of the Kink, Inc. sanctums.” And so I challenged him and I said, “Well, please name these prominent submissive men.” And he came back and he named four, one of which was “maymay”—he didn’t realize he was talking to me—

[Audience laughter.]

One of which “wasn’t around anymore,” his words. And the remaining two both [actually] self-identify as switches. So, this is not a surprise, I said, “Okay, that is 1 actually, not twelve. So, you’re either counting wrong, or what you thought of was ‘non-dominant’ men.” Which is a valid thing to think about but not the same. And what’s interesting to me about the not the same is that we have so many specializations now, right, this continued specialization of sexuality, as Ella was talking about earlier [today], created these incredibly segmented populaces which for some reason we’ve taken on to an n-th degree of essentialism as though that’s what’s important to be. And I suffer from that now, too. See also ‘used to identify as a switch.’

So with no role models, how do submissive men play? How do we learn to play? When children grow, and when animals in their little nests are biting one another’s ears, they’re not actually biting one another’s ears, they’re gonna figure out how to hunt. Well, what is our version of that without role models? What is the Ludic circle in which this can be safe for us?

So, back to the ethnographies, cuz these are really good. On social status, as an overview, Newmahr writes:

Through the acquisition and demonstration of specialized skills, the members of this community achieve social and interpersonal status. The paths to status, moreover, are clear and unambiguous; if members play well and get involved, they are all but guaranteed a high status in the community. In turn, this status confers desirability as a play partner, which is experienced by some as sexual romantic desirability.

[…]

Framing SM as a serious leisure pursuit shifts the focus away from the ultimately unhelpful questions about whether SM is or is not deviant sex, and allows us to understand SM as, most fundamentally, social behavior.

That’s really important. […] Play kinda becomes both labour in the capitalist sense, and capital, in the capitalist sense. It kinda looks like this: there’s an economy that goes on in The Scene, and it sort of looks like this. And I apologize, again, for not having the best presentation of this here. […] This is very crude. So what I call the BDSM Scene-State work-play economy looks something like this. And again, it’s reductive, all frameworks are.

We have, at A, playing or scening. Now, we’ll dig into this more in just a bit. Weiss in 2006, again, in “Working at Play” discusses this concept very, very articulately, how labour is a kind of play in The Scene. If you play, you earn status, or what Weber called Stande, as a player, if the play is good. Newmahr talks a little about this. Playing confers social capital, but you can also get social capital by volunteering at local events, hosting play parties, teaching workshops, being recognized, being notable. I should point myself out as someone who has social capital by being upset about all this.

[Audience laughter.]

That earns you access to play, which is its own capital. Right? You can get, for example—these things can be tangible—like invitations to parties, discounts to events and things like that, access to conferences, especially if you’re speaking at them. And that, of course, leads to more play, which leads to the attainment of more status, and on and on and on the cycle goes.

Now, you can enter this cycle in one of two main ways. You can sort of start at point A. You’re more likely to start at point A, by playing, if you’re conventionally attractive, if you’re female-identified, and if you’re a bottom, and especially if those things all line up. And you’re more likely to start at C if you’re less conventionally attractive, male-identified or presenting, or a top.

Let’s go into play a little bit, because play is widely misunderstood from this sort of class perspective, but it’s really important, especially when it comes to social classes. Play itself is classed in The Scene. Right? Different kinds of play are “heavier” or “harder,” more expert, and there are some valid reasons for this. It can be harder to do, technically, and so technical skill becomes a kind of very specific capital resource. And by capital resource I specifically mean social capital resource.

Again, Weiss is really articulate around this, and she writes, on the notion of play as capital:

As BDSM has become more mainstream, more organizationally focussed and more middle-class, practitioners work on their SM in self-conscious ways, mobilizing American discourses of self-improvement, actualization and education.

See also techniques and skills and classes and workshops and all that stuff. But it’s also re-combinative, play is also not just a way to enjoy oneself recreationally but it’s also re-creating the kinds of social contracts that we’re able to have with one another. And, again, Ella talked about this really well earlier. And as such, it becomes its own kind of alibi for power exchanges. Because you’ve created that particular kind of Ludic circle that you can actually enjoy, in a safe way, that kind of relationship with somebody else.

Access to play, on the other hand, is a form of capital. And Newmahr is particularly poignant about this. On, I’m sorry, on playing first:

[M]uch of the appeal of topping is the sense of efficacy, the observable and immediate response of a bottom contributes significantly to the enjoyment of play by tops. Most tops consider themselves “reaction junkies.” A bottom who moans, yelps, screams, laughs, wriggles, and writhes, is thus more desirable than one who is stoic during play, all else being equal.

And just for a moment, I’m gonna tangent into: and why are men who bottom specifically supposed to be stoic, then? What is with the silent men? They’re taught that, as a pattern, even to their own detriment. Fuckers.

Secondly, bottoms with a high pain tolerance allow for more creativity and less tentativeness on the part of the top. […B]ottoms who are edgy or extreme in their SM activity tend to have higher social status than those who are not. For the same reason as outlined above, bottoms who have fewer limits provide their partners with more possibilities, and often the opportunity to engage in play in which most others are uninterested.

So, tops achieve status through skills, techniques, etcetera.

On access to play, this comes back to the volunteerism, over on that side. Status as a volunteer, to enter the Scene’s work-play economy that way:

[It's] particular advantageous for people who top. Because of safety concerns, novices who bottom have less difficulty finding play partners than those who top. This results in faster access to status through play for bottoms, but also serves to track tops as volunteers. Volunteerism can result in increased access to play, which helps to mitigate the disadvantage tops face on the path to status in the community. It also contributes to an imbalance between tops and bottoms at the level of community leadership. Because most participants want to play soon after they enter the scene, and because bottoms do not need to become involved in order to obtain play, the result is the cultivation of tops as community leaders far more frequently than bottoms.

When was the last time you saw a presentation by a bottom for a bottom? And, in comparison, how many presentations by tops for tops (for those of you who are in such spaces)?

Okay, so, when we think about Weberian Stratification as a way to segment a populace within The Scene, we can see people who have access to lots of play, equipment, etc., have one component of high status. People who are dominants and tops tend to have another [component of] status, their Stande, their role orientation, and of course their Party or political affiliations, that’s another. So, then, people like the ones who are at—the ones who have, when coupled to the volunteerism and tracking tops as community leaders, you have typically (in so-called “pansexual” communities) dominant men who are white and able-bodied and community leaders and they have decision making roles in roles like [being on] the TES Board, at places like the Society of Janus, and Kink, Inc. as well. James Mogul was dominant guy yet ran Men In Pain for god knows how many years. So these are high-class individuals. […] High-class, also called the bourgeois if you wanna go all academic.

Then you have the proletariat, the working class, these are Scene regulars and so forth. And then this question comes up: who’s left back? Who’s wearing the invisible cloak? So, okay, examples of this, right?

Let’s look at how this play economy works in The Scene. And again, I’m using Kink, Inc. as an example but there are many others. Kink, Inc. is just very visible and also a good example because people like talking about them and then I get a lot of attention for having talked about them, which is really important for getting this fucking idea out there.

As an example, Kink, Inc.’s parties, especially The Upper Floor parties have free entry to community members. They syphon the community itself to play, generating labour, which then literally transforms into capital. Literally! And if you’re not getting paid, you’re not the customer, you’re a product. It kind of reminds me of Facebook. Like, really like Facebook. Like, that Facebook.

Now, I should clarify, it’s not “wrong” to do that. You have an opportunity to play? Good! Go! Have a blast! I’m talking about the systemics here. I’m not talking about your individual experience. I’m not talking about your particular experience. I’m talking about the way this reinforces itself, the way this system reinforces itself. It’s very fucking capitalist.

It’s also corrupt.

Now, you don’t really have to take my word on all of this. I wanna show you this example by Fleur De Li who wrote about her experience at a Kink, Inc. gangbang:

All of the guests began to ascend the stairs towards the Upper Floor. […] We were told to help ourselves to Red Wine, White Wine or Champagne. […] Shelly said that it was her understanding that the guests could participate if they so chose. She said that she had no interest in joining in, she just wanted to watch. Suddenly, I became very aware that this was an actual porn shoot and we were all extras.

Oh! Right! We’re at a porn company!

People were not really interested in the food, they were interested in the torture part. Peter [Ackworth] our handsome host told us all that since her hands were free we should feel free to fill them with a cock or a vagina.

Blah blah blah blah blah. This is all the sex part that I don’t really care about right now.

I noticed that these events fall into the category of mob mentality after awhile. Most people on their own would probably not be able to just jump right in, but when you have a table full of people all doing it suddenly you feel brave.

[…]

The guests were getting more and more into the physical torture. […] We took a short break[…].

What I want to highlight is:

First of all we were all pretty fucking drunk, which always makes things a bit more comfortable.

[…]

It all escalated so quickly.

[…]

I realized that my entire participation in this event was when I smacked Chloe a couple of times with a riding crop. Mind you I did this with the husband of the pianist[…]

Blah blah, more sex.

At this point I realized just how drunk I was, just how late it was and that I needed to scoot. I missed out on the money shot as they say in the industry. I slipped out of the room quickly and quietly without disrupting the scene. I put my coat on descended the stairs and headed out into the San Francisco night.

Now, this is a particularly telling example because the alcohol here highlights an incredible disconnect between the so-called high class and all the rest of us. It also highlights how the distinction between the corporatism part of this economy goes against and has a tension with the community aspects of it.

I heard some of you earlier going, “Really, booze comfortable on porn sets?” Yeah, that’s ’cause that’s not allowed in the community spaces. Right? Alcohol is not supposed to be part of BDSM play, and again, as someone who does play with alcohol, that’s not a problem. The problem here is not walking your talk. Kink, Inc. likes to think of itself as great for the community and the community likes to welcome them as wonderfully representative. Are they?

Alcohol in the community is not just sort of against the community norms. It’s very against the community norms. Not to bring up old shit unnecessarily, here’s an entry from someone who discussed someone who entered the SF Citadel not just sort of drunk but shit-faced drunk, staggering drunk. And he was let in, and I guess I won’t name names but he’s the founder of a very important BDSM website that starts with the name of “Fet” and ends with “Life.”

[Audience laughter.]

And, again, the individual incident isn’t important here, but this kind of shit happens all the time. He was let in because he has Stande, he has social status, because he has access to social resources. Now, of course, this particular incident, everyone apologized, it blows over, but that shit happens all the time. There is no due process at all in these communities—not for any, like, malicious, necessarily, reason; it hasn’t been developed yet, it’s new—I get it. Maybe we should be thinking about that more.

I mean, how often does this happen elsewhere?

[Audience: "All the time."]

There ya go.

So, this is simple to solve on a philosophical level: either the community recognize Kink, Inc. as not part of it, or Kink, Inc. changes its ways to match community norms. Or, secret option C, everyone keeps believing in this polite fiction. ‘Cause that’s just easier. ‘Cause then you have the invisibility cloak.

These rules about alcohol, for example (there are others), police Scene class more than they police safety, more than they have a way to keep people safe. All rules about sex police class as well as sex. And the community, for their part, are not just okay with this, but practically fucking sycophantic to these people because they have access to social resources. It’s very much like the way an aspirational voter votes for Republicans, right, like in the midwest. They’re coming for your fuckin’ Social Security money and you’re still voting for Republicans. “Because one day,” they think, “one day, I’ll be rich. One day, I’ll have access to social resources. If I’m just fucking brown-nose-y enough, they’ll like me. And then I’ll get to go and play.” I thought like that for a while. I know other people do, too.

And just like [for the] aspirational voter, it’s never gonna happen. It’s just not. Because it doesn’t serve them. There are actual, real examples of this.

How am I doing on time?

[Johannes: Maybe another 5 or 10 minutes?]

Okay, then I won’t go into too many specific examples of this but you’re welcome to look me up and I’ll be happy to name names then, too.

My favorite comment, also about that Kink, Inc. virginity thing, August Knight was at first very concerned—August Knight who owns the SF Citadel—was very concerned about what was happening, in response to a post that was posted on FetLife. Then Peter Ackworth responds, very placatingly, “No, no, everything’s fine.” [August's] next take ends with:

Yay for a fantasy lived ! ahh if only I was young and cute and in my 20′s! [sic.]

Literally sycophantic. So, my sense on all this, is that the community’s response to things like this mirrors the way an abused person defends their abusers.

Now, this safety fetishization, this idea that there’s no alcohol in the dungeon, ever, no alcohol when you’re playing, all kinds of safety rules—this started…. Now, at the same time that this doesn’t actually work, the same time that it’s policing class, it also polices how people can get this kind of labour-capital, how people get access to play in the first place. Because the thing that you are most oftenly told when you’re not a part of the community, or you have an interest in BDSM but you don’t have an outlet to the community, is to go to the community to learn the skills to be—why?—safe. So you don’t hurt anybody, which is an important point, but the paths all wind back to “come to the community.” Go to a munch first, go to the educational workshops. What if you don’t have the money for educational workshops? What then?

So, mostly, in private groupings, that are not The Scene, people learn through peer exchanges, because there’s no formal structure. Now that there is a formal structure, now that there is a formal Scene—and Weiss also talks about this, of what she calls “the rise of the new scene”—most people were learning these scene skills from their own little peer groups. Now, with the Scene-State, it encourages classes, and skill itself has become salable, because you get to teach how to play with something.

And there’s a reason why education sucks in The Scene, especially for bottoms. Look at all those previous prejudices. And the people who don’t have to go that way—when I was at the Kink, Inc. Armory, everyone who I asked said they found The Scene through the company first, not the community. “How did you get involved in the BDSM community? How did you get involved in BDSM?” I asked. “Well, I joined the company,” [they said.]—so those are the people who are not part of this economic ladder.

But again, it’s not that people are out for you individually. No one cares about you. No one cares about me. People aren’t out to get you, or me. It’s that nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. And that reminds me, not only of the George Carlin quote that I just quoted, but also of this quote by Martin Luther King. He says:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.

It’s the middle class, right? That’s the systemic oppressors, they have numbers. Now why was the Scene-State thing created? Because of a population boom called the Internet. The Internet thrust mass amounts of new people to this kind of sexuality, this kind of understanding of what they want to do, giving them an outlet to express it, and as such created that exact kind of organizationally-induced resource scarcity.

And this is also very important for notions of the digital divide where increasingly expressions of sexuality are coming to the fore on the Internet, which not everyone has access to. Now, if you look this specifically from within the Scene-State context, you can think of the notion of, “Oh, you shouldn’t do BDSM, or you can’t do BDSM in a safe way unless you’re at a club, with DMs [dungeon monitors]“—basically lifeguards, it’s a little bit like hearing, “Print is dead,” which is the same as saying “Poor people don’t deserve to read.”

So, as Duncan, Laura Duncan was just talking about, is it about a right, or is it market participation? What is it that gets you this? What’s what gets you in here? And refusal to participate in the public BDSM Scene is tantamount to the heresy of rejecting a consumerism in which play is this kind of labour-capital. What do you do if you don’t want to be part of a capitalist world? You live like a hippie in the mountains, I guess. And the problem with that is, SM is fundamentally social behavior. So you can’t be on your own. It does not work.

So, okay, I’ll close out, I promise.

Things we need. That’s all really negative, really angry. We really do need equal representation. And not just in imagery, but also in presentations, and workshops, and organizational structure. We’re not going to get to a better place just by abandoning this. I might not want to save it if it were burning all down, but I do think it is actually—the Scene-State—is actually a very important thing and we do actually need to maintain and protect it legally and politically and for all sorts of reasons. It is the source of antiserums that will help make a sexually healthy society, if we can utilize it for that and not just worry about getting ourselves off all the time.

We need to fucking acknowledge that there’s a whole lost population out there, people who come to The Scene and then leave. Why? Not because it wasn’t the right place to for them, but because it has absolutely none of a structure that will actually work for them. There is no social safety net in The Scene.

What are, for example, the volume sales of BDSM-related sex toys, whips for example, which are presumably used with partners versus the number of people who attend play parties in those same zip [postal] codes? Where are they? You think they’re not playing? You think they come to the SF Citadel once, leave and then are just not kinky again?

And so, again, it is important to say. And all I want to leave you with is this idea that I got from Dr. Seuss. And he says, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, it’s not going to get better. It’s not.” That’s my presentation.

[Applause.]

[Johannes: Questions?]

[…]

So the question was—for the recording, I should repeat it—the question was whether or not a woman who was drunk would be allowed into community spaces. I don’t want to speak for community spaces, for what they would do. I don’t know what they would do, I don’t know the future, but I can tell you that one’s gender in The Scene is much less important than these other factors. It’s the intersection between gender and role orientation that makes a particular difference when you look at things from a social justice perspective. In The Scene, because it is a space that particularly problematizes these ideas of, “Well, only men are dominant, and only women are submissive,”—we have transgender individuals as well in The Scene, we have people who are women who top and men who bottom—so the salient characteristic of an individual is not their gender but their role orientation. Right?

The role orientation becomes the status. So in The Scene, whether you’re a top or a bottom is sort of almost more important. It’s kind of like The Scene’s version of whether you are a man or a woman, whether you privileged based on that characteristic.

And the other part that I’d want to highlight is that it depends on all the social resources that one has. It’s not just social capital, although that is, I think, the most important one in The Scene-State, specifically because it doesn’t have a formal economy as such—like, a currency economy. Reputation is currency in The Scene. You get a bad reputation, you’re not going to have access to play, right? So it’s much more important to say good things about other people. It’s almost actually a social requirement when you’re in The Scene—people in The Scene talk about other people’s play like they’re grooming one another, because that’s what it is. So it depends on the various kinds of—y’know—it’s the matrix of Weber’s three-component theory. That’s the way I see it.

[Audience member: "A question and a comment in two parts. First, where does switches fit into this whole mess that you're talking about. Because there are a great many people who are very invested in those stereotypes. At the same time, there are a great many people who switch to one degree or another. And how does that interact within the constructions of power that you're talking about?"]

That’s a really, really good question. I like to, often, relate it to the notion of bisexuality. It is less the case now, thank god—this is one of the things I’m very optimistic about with The Scene’s younger generations because they are putting a lot more fluidity into everything. So the question was where do switches fit into all of this. And the answer is that they often get read as either top or bottom depending on what they are currently doing in much the same way that if you’re bi, if you identify as a bisexual and you’re with a guy and you are a guy, you will be read as gay. And if you are with someone who’s seen as the opposite sex you will be read as straight, even though we all, or many of us in this room, are very frustrated with the whole fucking gender binary to begin with.

You can get, for example, you can pass as a top if you’re a switch. So you get a kind of Scene version of passing privilege. And if you wanna take that, great, use it and do something good with your privilege. That is what I would imagine—it is an ethical obligation to do so if you have privilege, to do something good. Don’t just be good, be good for something.

[Audience: "Would you consider—have you considered starting a new Scene or a new website for people who are not focused on social capital, that are more intelligent and socially aware…?"]

That sounds like a very, very energy-intensive project.

[Audience laughter. Audience member: "Have you considered it?"]

So, the question is have you ever considered starting a new Scene, etcetera. Um, have I considered it? Yes, a lot. Have I actually acted on it? No. I sort of tried, but, I’m angry. And people don’t necessarily—I would probably be the nihilist, and that is not good for the creation of new things.

[Johannes: "It could be worse! You could be the angry prophet!"]

[Audience laughter.]

I could do that. But it’s important, I think, for people to first—there is nothing wrong with also being part of The Scene. Right? This is a good place for a lot of people. The question that I’m asking is who is it good for, who does it serve more than others, and do people care? If the answer is no, they don’t care, then fine, don’t care. I’m trying to find people who do. And so, not having had much of another way to do so, I simply got very loud about this particular thing. And it has attracted, like I said, a kind of social capital where I got known for this.

I get play offers for being angry about this. Male Submission Art was one of the best things I could have done to get people who are the other side of the coin to me to be interested in me and the thing that I’m frustrated about is that the people who tend to then have that, stop. Because their needs are met. Well, good for fucking you. But where’s the rest? So that’s where I see [them fall short of] that ethical obligation I mentioned.

But I’d be interested in talking with you more about that, if you want to.

[Applause.]

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

—Thomas Paine

Kink, in exile:

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

[…]

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

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

Galiana Chance:

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

[…]

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

Professor Chaos:

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

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

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

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

As Tomio Black said,

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

Or, in Chaos’s words:

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you ever go?”

“A bunch of times.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?” I asked.

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

“Your girlfriend doesn’t?”

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

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

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

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

“How do you do it?” he asked at last.

“Do what?”

“Keep writing.”

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

“God, I don’t know,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bus Driver

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh? How long has it been?” I probed.

“6 years,” she said.

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

“Joyce,” she said.¹

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Show us?” they asked.

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

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

“Yup,” Val said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gadfly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Change The Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. This name has been changed.

And why do I have this much trouble? Because the concept of eroticization itself has become a site of immense anguish. Every time something “swings my thoughts in that direction,” I hurt. And deeply. Read my archives and you’ll no doubt see I’ve become darker, more bitter, more jaded, meaner, more ugly. I’m scarred and scared and broken and horribly disfigured. And I’ve said all of this before.

To continue under the sabotaging influence of the epistemic abuse present in the euphemistically named “sex-positive” bubble in which I (try to) live, I’ve begun to tell pieces of my own story. I’ve dug up my own past experiences to use as inspiration because reading the experiences of others reliably sends me into a tailspin of outrage and jealousy and resentment.

What I’m trying to do in all of this is to get you—and everyone you know—to ask one simple question: “How did this happen to maymay?” If I’m really lucky, you’ll also ask the two obvious followups: “Is it happening to other people?” (the answer is yes, by the way) and “How can we make it better?” I’ve been staring at several drafts and struggling to make them coherent in order to lead my readers (and parts of myself) along that quest.

But in the meantime, Delving into Deviance published a post that I’ve been waiting to read from a self-identified dominant woman for a long, long time. Best of all, I could get to its end because it was mercifully free of the sexual triggers that so often make me “step aaawwaaayyyy from the computer!”

Her post is all old, but important news:

[P]ublic adoration (and objectification) of a male submissive is rare. As I’ve come to realize the fucked up state of femdom, I’ve concurrently become aware of the fucked up state of male submission – namely, it’s devaluation. While female dominants are made out to be some scarce resource, male submissives are depicted as a dime a dozen – common, and, even more disturbingly, weak and worthless.

[…]

What is it that makes dominant women uncomfortable with femdom? There are a lot of things. One of the biggest is the sexist attitude that is rampant in the BDSM community. It often seems like women have to remain ice queens, untarnished by actually having penile-vaginal intercourse with their male subs. However, if they want to they can become more male, and thus, more dominant by strapping on and becoming – duh duh duh – The Penetrator. This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with strapping on (I’m a fan myself), but a sex act does not a Dominant (or a submissive) make and we can’t just superimpose the male-female dichotomy onto Dominant-submissive and expect that to make anyone happy.

It’s not just female dominants who are getting a raw deal and are having to battle through a mire of expectations in order to engage in the kink they thought they loved. Male submissives find themselves in a community with very few potential partners. Of the potential partners, many will be professional dominatrices, and many (even non-pros) will expect their submission straight out of the gate because of a hidden assumption that if you’re a submissive man you must be willing to submit to just anyone. In defense of these Doms, the moment a woman signs up for any BDSM website she will get an influx of messages from men offering just that – men who want to be her “slave” who have never even had a conversation with her. However, after wading through these fantasists, a dominant woman will eventually find a man who fits her bill because she is valued, and thus, many men will be willing to try to do so.

Submissive men, however, have a much harder time. Because there is this perception of a ratio like 1:20 and because many submissive men either perpetuate the femdom icequeen-bitch ideal that no woman can or perhaps should live up to on a day-to-day basis, male submissives become devalued.

Some have suggested that female pro-dommes also devalue male submission (my boyfriend for one). I don’t think that pro-Dommes cause this problem, but I think that oftentimes they don’t help. Pro-Dommes meet a need. They are the supply to a demand. However, they contribute to the perpetuation of a picture of female domination that just doesn’t reflect real life. But they’re not the root of that problem. As a parallel, just because vanilla men have sex workers and porn doesn’t mean that they don’t know that they can’t expect the same look and sex acts from their girlfriends and wives. However, imagine a world in which vanilla men didn’t meet any women until they began encountering sex workers and porn. This could lead to a much more confusing dynamic for both those vanilla men and the non-professional women they might encounter.

(Emphasis mine.)

It’s not only extremely validating to me to read these words from someone else, it’s also extremely important to me that these words were written by a self-identified dominant woman. An unpopular truth is the fact that it is because of the fucked up attitudes Delving into Deviance describes (and that Thomas Millar described more academically) that it almost doesn’t matter how long I, maymay, a submissive man have been saying this—and publicly—for almost half a decade now. People just won’t listen or will derail me (sometimes with their own de-contextualized categorical privilege arguments; “but you have male privilege!”) nearly as much as they’re going to listen to a dominantly-identified individual.

That’s the same fucked up bullshit happening elsewhere. The feminist movement needs feminist men not because women are in fact weak, but because men have a privilege women do not. Black people need White allies. Similarly, submissive people need dominants to speak the fuck up with—not for, with—us.

On a personal note, it’s worth calling my own writing out as vicious and angry because when it comes to the niche of the BDSM community and its interactions, I am an angry, bitter, broken man. I wish I were some kind of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, filled with nothing but love for all oppressors. But I’m just not that perfect. I’m sorry. I’m really, really filled with sorrow about that. But that’s who I am now—hateful and doing my damnedest to direct that hate where it belongs, rather than where it doesn’t.

Some in the BDSM community think I’m a monster, a troll, or a troublemaker. Well, they made me. So ask yourselves, dear BDSM community: How did this happen to maymay? Because for as long as you don’t, there’s going to be a whole lot more “trouble” to come. I’ll see to that myself.

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

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

I was only 18, after all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m glad,” I told him. And I was.

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

“Of course.”

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

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

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

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

“Have fun tonight,” I told him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We ought always hate the status quo. Always.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

(Emphasis mine.)

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

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

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

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

“Unreality” and the politics of experience

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

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

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

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

That is a shitty standard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah!” she said excitedly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The SF Armory Tour

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

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

“What’ll you have?” she asked me.

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

“On the rocks?”

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

“Nicki Blue,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked the obvious: “Why no men?”

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

“What’s interesting to you?” I asked.

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

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

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

“You get plenty of women,” I said.

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

“Why do you think that is?” I asked.

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

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

The After-After Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A…?” James asked, leaning forward.

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

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

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

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

“Well, thank you again!”

“What size shoe are you?”

“I’m an 11.”

“Me, too.”

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

“C’mon, say it,” James goaded me.

“What?” I asked.

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

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll say it to you.”

James laughed. “All right. Go ahead.”

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

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

“That’s fair,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“And you, Donna?”

“I’m usually topping.”

“And in your personal encounters?”

“Well, it switches.”

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

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

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

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

I nodded, unsurprised.

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

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

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

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

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

“Me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Shannon,” she said.³

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

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

“Oh? Why not?”

“It’s a bad deal.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was an awkward pause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah!” he agreed.

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

“Oh, just the whole thing,” he said.

“Like what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections on my Interactions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cue the media firestorm.

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

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

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

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

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

But, publishing classified documents is illegal, right?

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

As Glenn Greenwald has been tirelessly reiterating time and again:

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

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

Think you know your privacy rights?

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

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

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

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

Can we say “libel”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How about HIPAA?

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

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

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

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

Plausible legal options

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take the red pill, literally for fuck’s sake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good girl.”

I don’t think there’s anything that captures my mixed feelings about submission like that phrase. There’s so much in there.

Until very recently, it was one of my least favorite things to hear. So condescending. Patronizing. Paternalistic.

[…]

[W]hat feminist wants to be a Good Girl? After all, every feminist knows that Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. And then there’s the whole madonna-whore complex thing, which will certainly be a subject of its own post at some point.

[…]

So that’s why I don’t like “good girl.” Or rather, why I don’t want to like “good girl.” Because, honestly? I fucking love it. It makes my pussy wet and my heart sing. The first time a dominant partner called me a “good girl,” I felt like I had just taken a shot of morphine. And I wanted more.

[…]

[T]he very fact that I like it so much[…]is a little, well, humiliating. And that just adds an extra frission of erotic stimulation and emotional intensity. As maymay said once, ”I don’t want to be tortured, but I want it.” Obviously, being called a “good girl” is not exactly torture, but I think maymay perfectly captures that paradox of being submissive for me—of wanting the things I don’t want. I want them both in spite of and because of the fact that I don’t want them.

There is, indeed, so much in there. Others’s comments are good, too. I left a comment, which turned into two comments, both of which are relevant enough to this space that I’m cross-posting the ensuing exchange:

Huh. Interesting.

For what it’s worth, being a “good boy” has been one of my favorite things to hear for as long as I can remember. Reading your uncomfortableness towards the phrase makes me inclined to attribute our differing feelings about it to our gendered experiences in the world. (For another example, see also The Sexism of Sex and Smarts.)

When you say:

Oh, and of course, there’s the fact that it’s “good girl.” I know it’s pretty commonplace to refer to grown women as girls, and I do it all the time. But there’s no denying that it adds to the patronizing tone.

I’m reminded of the examples many dictionaries cite to explain the meaning of the word “pretty”: pretty song, pretty room, pretty girl. These are (sexist) sexual standards. They hurt me—and many others, too.

Also, Leah:

I like the powerlessness of the experience. […] Sometimes it embarrasses me to ask for a thing, but I do so out of desire — because I want. Although I am not the one in control, I nevertheless consider myself an equal partner, fully complicit in the sex.

In my (not so) humble opinion, extricating control from power is what claiming sexually submissive agency is about. We are not often taught, as bottoms in the BDSM Scene, how to do this and I think that’s because most of the BDSM community at large has an unacceptably poor understanding of the systemics of power itself, sexual and otherwise. It seems to me that your desire for the experience of powerlessness feels at odds with your claim of “complicity” precisely because you wish to abdicate your control of the sexual situation in order to serve the fantasy of “not being in control.”

That’s totally cool (and fun), but by your own admission of being “an equal partner,” that’s not really what’s happening. Put another way, the liminal space of “wanting what we don’t want” problematizes dichotomized notions of control to a degree that threatens much of the powerful/powerlessness fantasies intrinsic to most BDSM discourse. The BDSM community, writ large, enjoys either/or thinking to an astonishingly damaging degree—not to mention how disgustingly sexist they are.

Let’s develop a deeper understanding so more of us can approach these issues using both/and thinking, instead.

FeministSub briefly responded asking for clarifications:

This comment will take me a while to work through. :) But thank you! I did stop and think while I was writing this about whether or not male subs enjoy “good boy.” It actually made me think about how much of the language of domination and submission is at least subtly gendered.

Do you mind explaining what you mean by this?

Put another way, the liminal space of “wanting what we don’t want” problematizes dichotomized notions of control to a degree that threatens much of the powerful/powerlessness fantasies intrinsic to most BDSM discourse.

Since she asked, I went ahead and risked explaining without sugarcoating:

I did stop and think while I was writing this about whether or not male subs enjoy “good boy.” It actually made me think about how much of the language of domination and submission is at least subtly gendered.

Subtly? :) It’s quite overt. “Sissy,” “bitch,” “slut,” etc., all usually treat femininity as intrinsically submissive.

And it’s not just gendered. Sexually dominant and submissive lingo frequently puts underprivileged (oppressed) populaces in the submissive role while putting privileged populaces in the dominant one. See, for example, “little girl/boy,” which highlights both size and age—youth are arguably the most consistently disadvantaged populace on the planet—or “who’s your daddy,” for the reciprocal perspective. In other words, if “power is an aphrodisiac,” then oppression is a sexual performance enhancing drug.

In my experience, most BDSM’ers like to avoid thinking about this potentially uncomfortable truth because they either think it might ruin their fun or that they’re not complicit in the damage this can cause. But turning a blind eye to this is as idiotic as saying talking about sex (e.g., negotiating) “ruins” the fun of playing or it’s narcissistic to the point of being inhumane. Yes, some BDSM’ers say that and are those things, too, and they’re usually idiots or privileged shits.

Do you mind explaining what you mean by this?

Put another way, the liminal space of “wanting what we don’t want” problematizes dichotomized notions of control to a degree that threatens much of the powerful/powerlessness fantasies intrinsic to most BDSM discourse.

Oh, all I mean is that most BDSM’ers enjoy treating “What It Is That We Do” as a dichotomy of power wherein bottoms/submissives have none (they are powerless) and tops/dominants have all of it (they are powerful), as if it’s all some kind of zero-sum, either/or game. The way the community talks about this (i.e., its discourse) typically fails to acknowledge or delegitimizes situations in which bottoms have power and tops do not (regardless of whether or not they also have “control”).

For instance, “service top” is a vague pejorative in the BDSM community precisely because it threatens the “powerfulness” of a top. Conversely, “do-me bottom” is similar because it threatens the “powerlessness” of a bottom. I think this is why expressing desire in the form of “wanting what I don’t want” is complicated; it problematizes my own fantasy of absolute powerlessness and my top’s absolute powerfulness, which can feel threatening to many ignorant or simple-minded BDSM’ers.

Since so much of the way the BDSM community and, in fairness, contemporary overarching society, couples submission with femininity and femininity with powerlessness, it should come as no surprise that most BDSM’ers are profoundly sexist and, worse, often willfully ignorant of that. Sadly, the petulant self-righteousness with which many of them go about espousing their “lifestyle” can easily obscure a greater understanding of both the problems with and benefits of “The Scene.” They certainly obscured them from me for a long, long time.

I hope that wasn’t too brash a comment for your blog. I think your post was really good.

As is always the case, the best places to see idiocy and inhumane narcissism of the kind I described is to go to the places where idiots and privileged shits talk amongst themselves. The Internet is amazing for this because few people have the technological know-how to shield their internal discourse from prying eyes—not to mention that such shielding is often antithetical to the point of telecommunication in the first place. In this sense, FetLife offers ideal grounds for privileged-shit-spotting, and David Futrelle’s blog Man Boobz consistently offers awesome roundups and priceless quotes from inside the pro-sexism MRA forums.