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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oooooooo ooo ooooo oooh….

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

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

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

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

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

Are you ready?

“Polyamory” doesn’t empower “Relationship Choice”

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

What happened here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Polyamory’s Fetish for Neologisms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• This is an “intimate network.”

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

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

How Polyamory’s Institutions Undermine Relationship Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Communicating about Communication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fractal boundaries: Disruption and resistance are sensors

How can we see invisible things?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[BEGIN Audience participation:

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

END Audience participation.]

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

[BEGIN Audience participation:

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

END Audience participation]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repulsive Intimacy: Violence is not the opposite of intimacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Choose Love: Inventing Our Powers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, the word “decision” is defined as:

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

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

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

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

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

• “resistance is submission.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be A Hero: Make Triadic Relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Three Keys to Triadic Relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are polyamorous people. We are superheroes.

Thank you for your time and attention.

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.

My talk was called “Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher,” and I subtitled it “How to make keeping it up easy and taking it down hard.” I wrote the longest talk I’ve ever given (~7,300 words) and, in my usual style, supplemented it with a slide deck totaling 220 rapid-fire visual aids. In the end, I felt like it went over pretty well, although I was exceptionally nervous.

I was nervous first and foremost because this talk had several far-reaching objectives. Among them were driving home the importance of fighting for freedom of information and free speech, explaining the way Internet censorship and sex-negativity support and often rely on one another, and exploring how social networking theory can help cure the current worldwide pandemic of sexual paranoia. Moreover, I also wanted to provide as much insight as possible into the months of thinking that have gone into my “FetLife Considered Harmful: The Risks of Sex Ghettoization” essay in an effort to clarify it, because much of the backlash against it (and me) coming from FetLife members and some sexuality community stalwarts betrays their profound ignorance of the issues at hand.

That’s a tall order. On top of all of that, however, I also had no idea who my audience was going to be, other than that they paid to see me speak at a conference focusing on polyamory. Were they going to be techies or luddites? Young digital natives or stereotypically technophobic moms and grandparents? All of the above? No matter how homogenous and receptive in-person attendees may have been, however, I also live streamed the talk and I knew I was going to publish it on my blog for the Internet to see.

Ultimately, I chose to de-jargonize the whole talk; I never use the word “database” and I only use the word “data” 5 times. I don’t think I mention anything more technologically complicated than “a proprietary file format,” and I use the ubiquitous example of a Photoshop PSD when I do. I tried to discuss the issue generically while still providing practical guidance because when talking to a large group, talking about too many specifics would likely benefit only several individuals, not the whole group.

In the end, this presentation is about the “practical theory” of anti-censorship techniques, and while I focus on technical (Internet) censorship most, “censorship” is defined loosely. I again drew heavily on FetLife as a case study but I mercifully had way longer for this talk (an hour and a half) than for my KinkForAll Providence 2 talk in which I first presented my concerns about that site (20 minutes). Even so, I still didn’t have time to go into as much nuance as I’d have liked. Complicating factors like Reed’s and Sarnoff’s laws were left out of my talk entirely and I feel like I just barely scratched the surface of what I did mention, such as applications for Metcalfe’s law.

Nevertheless, it just so happened that a conference about polyamory was the perfect place to give this talk.

I want to thank the staff of Atlanta Poly Weekend for accepting my proposal, for putting up with me when I insisted that they re-organize the layout of my session’s room, for giving me a wireless microphone since I had a sore throat so I didn’t have to strain my voice to give the speech, for making a special effort to video record my speech and my slides, and for generally treating me way nicer than I’m used to, even though the VIP treatment made me a bit uncomfortable. Most of all, though, I want to thank everyone who offered encouragement when they saw me banging away at my keyboard in the hotel hallways late at night actually working on finishing this thing.

And that’s another reason why I’m nervous. This presentation is a first draft!

So, without further ado, below is a low-fidelity video of my presentation recorded from the live stream. (The high-quality version has yet to make it to me.) Like all my similar work, this presentation is “open source” and Creative Commons licensed. Feel free to download it, use it yourself (including, since I can only be at one place at one time, literally re-presenting it wherever you wish and are able), or share it with anyone you think might find it valuable. If you do any of these things, I would greatly appreciate a link back to this page.

Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher by maymaym on Ustream

Download:

• Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher keynote presentation as a ZIP archive.
• Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher keynote presentation as a PDF document.
• Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher slides (and animations) as a QuickTime movie.
• Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher keynote presentation as a text transcript.

[Video of The Machine is Us/ing Us plays.]

What do bananas have to do with censorship? What do polyamorous people have in common with fax machines? And how can you help your ideas have sex? These are the three questions I’m going to answer in this seminar.

We live in an amazing moment in history. As I bet any sexually vocal person will tell you (if you don’t already know), the Internet has fundamentally transformed our ability to communicate with one another. For example, before the Internet, if you were a gay teenager in bum-fuck nowhere, you were the only gay person in the world. Now, though, after the Internet, if you’re a gay teenager in bum-fuck nowhere, you’re one of millions of gay teenagers communicating online.

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

The second sexual revolution is about information

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. Yes, the Internet was originally conceived of like a weapon.

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.

The 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 exactly 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. [Video: "Why do you think the world will be in chaos for 50 years?" clips play.] You may be asking yourselves, “Why is any of this important? So what if we are living in a time of media chaos?”

It’s important because disruption is the precursor to progress, and successful innovation harnesses chaos. Create chaos carefully, and you will be a force to be reckoned with. This seminar is about how to be a force to be reckoned with online.

Last month, on February 21, 2011, in an episode of Al Jazeera’s show “Empire” titled Social networks, social revolution host of Democracy Now! Amy Goodman asked:

In the United States, we don’t have State Media, but you have to ask, ‘In this country, if we had State Media, how would it be any different?’

While it is true that never before in human history have individuals like you and me been so empowered to create change using available telecommunication technologies, it is also true that never before in human history have all the technological pieces necessary for a totalitarian Police State existed simultaneously, as envisioned by Orwell—until now. In today’s age of postmodern warfare, information itself can be a weapon of mass destruction.

Information weapons come in two main forms: propaganda and censorship. Both can be considered cultural terrorism, each pointing in different directions. For us as sexual freedom advocates, propaganda includes fear-based messages spreading sexual paranoia or moral panic. Its target is the general populace. Censorship includes the firewalls, content filters, and bandwidth limits intended to target you—sex-positive publishers.

Lest you think I’m being hyperbolic, let’s look at some recent examples of the information landscape.

The censoring of sex

Perhaps the most obvious examples of Internet censorship can be found in China. But China also offers a particularly relevant case study for sex-positive publishers.

In 2003, a woman writing under the nom de plume of “Muzi Mei” became a notorious household name in mainland China after she started blogging about her sexual encounters with a number of men. She displayed a confidence that may seem familiar to many of you. In November of that year, she was featured in a New York Times article which reads, in part:

[…A]s China’s propaganda machine has promoted the nation’s new space hero or the latest pronouncements from Communist Party leaders, the Chinese public has seemed more interested in a 25-year-old sex columnist whose beat is her own bedroom. […] Mu Zimei is both reviled and admired, but she is not ignored. […] Her celebrity — which exploded when she posted an explicit online account of her tryst with a Chinese rock star — first seemed to baffle government censors but now has drawn a familiar response. Her forthcoming book was banned this week. She has quit her magazine columnist job and halted her blog, or online diary.

Yet at a time when ”Sex and the City” episodes are among the most popular DVD’s in China, the Mu Zimei phenomenon is another example of the government’s struggle to keep a grip on social change in China. Her writings have prompted a raging debate about sex and women on the Internet, where more people are writing blogs or arguing anonymously about a host of subjects in chat rooms and discussion pages.

”She does bring a huge impact on Chinese society,” said Zeng Fuhu, a top editor at Sohu.com.

[…]

[Ms. Mu] said she never realized her […] online diary would be so widely discovered, or that it would grow into a national controversy. But she defended her right to sleep with as many men as she pleased — and to write about it.

“If a man does this,” she said, “it’s no big deal. But as a woman doing so, I draw lots of criticism.”

[…]

Ms. Mu does not regard herself as peddling smut. She said her generation of Chinese grew up with little or no sex education. ”Some learned it from videos,” she said. ”Why not from words?”

Muzi Mei had opened pandora’s box. In the years that followed, a wave of celebrity sex bloggers, all young women, spread across China, each more audacious than the last. In 2004, a Chinese university student named Fu Rong Jie Jie posted softcore pictures of herself along with “lovelorn prose” and quickly became the country’s next phenomenon, calling herself “Sister Lotus.” She flat-out declared, “I will not be censored,” but by 2005 she had a cult following so large that Chinese censors ordered the country’s top blog host to move posts covering her to low-profile areas of the site and pulled a TV documentary about her from airing at all.

Meanwhile, another blogger, Liu Mang Yan, aka. “Lost Sparrow,” began podcasting lovemaking noises she recorded categorized by geographical regions of the country. That year, Pacific News Service reported:

In a culture where sexual attitudes are still repressive, the racy details shared by the women bloggers are thrusting them into the spotlight, despite China’s most recent crackdown on the Internet news media.

[…]

Though the Internet community for women is thriving, the Chinese government is stepping up its efforts to regulate online bloggers. China’s Ministry of Information Industry and the State Council on Sept. 24 released new regulations containing vague language banning sexually explicit content on the Web, which many analysts say are aimed at bloggers. Observers say the real goal of China’s Internet censorship is to prevent leadership and movement rising from the medium.

(Emphasis added.)

Sex-positive publishers, regardless of the labels they claim for themselves, have such a powerful effect on the inherently misogynistic, patriarchal, and sex-negative forces governing the world today that they—you, us—represent the collective human drive for self-determination. As Dr. Katrien Jacobs, Assistant Professor of Media and Communication studies at Hong Kong University writes in her book Netporn: DIY web culture and sexual politics:

[Reports] show that the PRC [People's Republic of China] party-state encourages the spread of the Internet while it believes that it can monitor and censor those aspects of activity that it sees as destabilizing, dangerous, and unhealthy. The PRC indirectly regulates the Internet by directly regulating intermediary actors/owners of cyber-cafés, ISPs [Internet Service Providers], Internet content providers (ICPs), and everyday citizens. For instance, the Guangdong public security department has agreed with local telecommunications companies to pay a reward of up to 2,500 yuan (US$309) to people who report any type of netporn traffic.

Dr. Jacobs also describes “the Chinese government’s provisions that were included in a draft of regulations in the year 2000 to govern telecommunications and the publication of news and electronic information on the Internet.” These regulations were a list of amazingly broad and vaguely defined “forbidden contents,” which were simply banned:

information that (1) Contradicts the principles defined in the constitution [of the PRC]; (2) Endangers national security, discloses state secrets, subverts the government, or destroys the unity of the country; (3) Damages the honor and the interests of the State; (4) Instigates ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination, or destroys the unity of [China's] nationalities; (5) Has negative effects on the state’s policy on religion or propagates evil cults or feudal superstition; (6) Disseminates rumors, disturbs social order, and undermines social stability; (7) Spreads lewdness, pornography, gambling, violence, murder; (8) offends or defames other people, infringes upon the rights and interests of other people; and (9) Other contents that are forbidden by law or administrative regulations.

Number 7 in particular, which lumps lewdness and porn together with murder, deserves being called out as what Dr. Marty Klein calls a “phony category”:

It’s a common strategy in public policy discussions—creating a category that lumps two dissimilar things together, and decrying the more serious of the two. We’re all in favor of preventing hangnails and heart attacks, aren’t we? We MUST do something about that!

Also in 2005, in what was known as China’s “great Internet pornography trial,” the Chinese government sentenced 11 defendants, 5 of whom were university students, to prison for between three and twelve years. They were convicted as Internet pornographers under the censors’ regulations for administering a fee-based online BBS, 99bbs.com, whose users traded pornographic content. Dr. Jacobs describes the trial as an attempt of the government not to eradicate porn distribution but to undermine the very vitality of a new social network [because t]he values of this Chinese network were different from those of official mainstream society controlled by the PRC. It announced a sex/porn revolution in a twilight zone: It included the sharing of sexual ideas and communication by both women and men and gave its people access to pornography.

All of this censorship of sexuality is an erotophobic tightening of the social sphere. All of these regulations are fronts for an ideology that constrains women and sexual minorities. In China’s great Internet pornography trial, the lone female defendant, 29-year-old Zhao Yong, got the strictest sentence: twelve years. And just in case you needed any more convincing, just this week—THIS WEEK—32 Chinese women were reportedly arrested for writing and publishing gay erotica on the Internet.

China is not the only country with such repressive information policies.

Iran is equally repressive, of course, but so is Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Syria, and Vietnam, for example. Note, in particular, Tunisia and Egypt—both in the news recently due to their revolutions—were suffering equally pervasive Internet censorship, according to data from Reporters Without Borders. And Saudi Arabia, a key US ally in the Middle East, is just as bad. In fact, most countries that are connected to the Internet conduct some level of Internet censorship, including the United States. Interestingly, among First World American allies, Australia—Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s home country—is by far the worst.

Still think Internet censorship can’t happen here, in the Western so-called liberal democracies? In many of these countries, legislatures have been trying to ban content from the Internet for years under various guises: “combating copyright infringement,” “defending national security,” “eradicating child pornography.” These causes are routinely misused and abused to support a pro-censorship agenda, I say as someone who would support legitimate efforts to do all of those things.

And what’s censored most?

Blogs—especially sex blogs—like yours and mine. Personal blogs are more censored even than opposition political party websites, according to data compiled by the OpenNet Initiative.

A few years ago, I started keeping a list of corporations and public facilities that censored my blog and I encouraged my readers to report any blocking to me. I learned that I’m censored by the free Wi-Fi provider in both Long Beach, CA’s airport and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Austin, Texas; by Bolt Bus’s free Wi-Fi; by NASA’s Goddard facility in Greenbelt, Maryland; Vodafone UK censors my blog unless subscribers ask to opt-out of “Content Control”; and I’m censored by the public libraries in Austin, Texas, Sacramento, California, and Providence, Rhode Island (even on computers specifically reserved for use by adults).

Internet filtering at public libraries in America is actually mandated by a 2003 law known as the “Children’s Internet Protection Act” despite numerous reports, including the Youth Safety on a Living Internet report published in June 2010, saying Internet filtering is actually bad for kids and their education. Such misguided attempts at “protection” result in a sexuality information deficit that causes terrible emotional, and often even physical and legal, damage to the very youth they claim to be protecting.

This isn’t supposed to happen, right? The premise—and the promise—of the Internet was that you, an individual with something—anything—to say, can reach a global audience with the push of a button. But that simple activity presumes that on the Internet, all content is created equal. Or, as ever so famously phrased, “In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits.”

But if that were really true, non-controversial content would be pretty much the same as controversial content, perhaps of a political nature. Of course, we know that even in America, content is not all treated equally. The ACLU recently launched a campaign called Don’t Filter Me! because they received reports of LGBT websites being blocked in schools because they were LGBT education websites!

Censorship also happens in the form of service discrimination, not merely content blocking. For instance, after Wikileaks began releasing US diplomatic cables in December, 2010, it faced a series of extrajudicial attacks: Amazon kicked Wikileaks off its servers, Everydns.net withdrew its domain name, and PayPal froze WikiLeaks’ account. The amazing thing about this is that each and every one of these attacks has a sexual censorship precedent.

In other words, if you didn’t see this coming, you weren’t talking about sex loudly enough.

The folks who published the NYC Sex Blogger Calendar have had their PayPal account frozen and their funds seized not once, but twice, before they decided to ditch the service way back in 2008. Web celeb Violet Blue’s “sex-positive URL shortener,” vb.ly, had its domain name seized by the Libyan government in October, 2010. And just one month before Amazon cut off WikiLeaks, there was a big hoopla over Amazon’s initial defense of, then banning of a “Pedophile book” from their virtual shelves. Interestingly, Amazon initially said it wouldn’t pull the book because that would amount to censorship. Eventually, Amazon capitulated to public pressure and, of course, now the book is gone.

Amazon’s conflicting actions with regards to the pedophile book should teach us 2 very important lessons. First, that censorship can be social just as much as as it can be technical. And secondly, that sexual speech will always be in the vanguard of anti-censorship efforts. Thus, sexual speech will always be censorship’s initial—but never its last—casualty.

So here’s how we can frame the censorship versus free speech problem: On the Internet, even if your content may not be illegal, if you can’t find anyone to host it, link to it, or bill for it, it may as well be. In exactly the same way as Julian Assange is being called a “terrorist,” not a journalist, Galileo was being called a heretic, not a scientist. And in a fascistic world where such ludicrous stigma is treated as dogmatically-enforced fact, since I’m a “sex” blogger discussing sexuality a lot online, they call me a “pedophile.”

Of course, we’re none of those things. Nevertheless, we’ll all get called these things because, in the words of national security blogger Maximilian Forte, “The real ‘insurgency’ is the one being fought at home. To the state, every defiant citizen is a terrorist, in mind if not in practice.”

You may not have realized it until now, but because you as a sex-positive publisher publish material asserting different values from the mainstream society controlled by corporations and your government, websites like the Chinese 99bbs.com are your kindred spirits.

Circumvention Tactics for Information Guerrillas in the Culture War

Anti-censorship is called circumvention because it helps you dodge, or circumvent, the censors. Since there are many different publishing platforms, I’m not going to get into the technical nitty-gritty of which button to push on which screen. If you want to talk about that with me, I’d be happy to speak with you privately later.

Instead, I’m going to detail three best practices that, taken together, I hope will provide a framework for how to build anti-censorship techniques directly into the way you think about publishing itself. Each concept builds on the one beneath it, so you can think of any action you take online to be a cumulative result of these principles in action. They are:

1. Avoid single points of failure,
2. diversify your distribution network, and
3. liberate your data.

Let’s go through them one by one.

Avoid single points of failure

First, you need to be aware of single points of failure and do your best to avoid them.

A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system which, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. This is also known as the weakest link, and is the single most critical concept in this entire presentation. To explain this, let me tell you a short story about bananas.

Dangers of a banana (and sexuality) monoculture

When Americans think of bananas, they think of one and only one variety: the Cavendish. In the words of Chiquita, the globe’s largest banana producer, the Cavendish is “quite possibly the world’s perfect food.” But it also happens that all of the 100 billion Cavendish bananas eaten annually worldwide are genetically identical; every commercial Cavendish banana tree is grown from cuttings of the original tree. This genetic monoculture is the Cavendish banana’s single point of failure.

Since it lacks the genetic diversity key to a species’ health, any fungal or bacterial disease that infects one banana plantation can infect them all. That’s exactly what happened in the early 1900′s when similarly genetically identical crops of the Gros Michel variety of banana were devastated by a fungus called Panama disease. It ravaged plantations across the globe for decades.

According to a 2005 article at PopSci.com:

Growers adopted a frenzied strategy of shifting crops to unused land, maintaining the supply of [Gros Michel] bananas to the public but at great financial and environmental expense—the tactic destroyed millions of acres of rainforest. By 1960, the major importers were nearly bankrupt, and the future of the fruit was in jeopardy. […] U.S. banana executives were hesitant to recognize the crisis facing the Gros Michel. […] Once a little-known species, the Cavendish was eventually accepted as Big Mike’s replacement after billions of dollars in infrastructure changes were made to accommodate different growing and ripening needs. Its advantage was its resistance to Panama disease. But in 1992, a new strain of the fungus—one that can affect the Cavendish—was discovered in Asia. Since then, Panama disease Race 4 has wiped out plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and Taiwan, and it is now spreading through much of Southeast Asia.

Insistence on a banana monoculture is once again costing billions of dollars in efforts to save the Cavendish from extinction, just as was once spent—fruitlessly—on the Gros Michel. It seems to me that growing multiple varieties of bananas and importing all of them would be better for business and the environment. Yet American culture’s obsession with essentialism—on dichotomies, which are, briefly, a set of “good” things that are exclusive from an opposing set of “bad” things—discourages US banana execs from diversifying their product line, thereby keeping the American populace largely ignorant of banana varieties and contributing to environmental disaster.

The problem is not with any given consumer’s desire for a consistent—Cavendish-only—experience, but rather with the lack of anything other than a proscriptive experience as the only option, whereas others are, in fact, available.

That’s the exact same dynamic playing out with regards to sexuality information. You and I live in wild banana fields, where a variety of sexuality information is growing all around us. But most Americans are being allowed to access only one very specific kind of sexual information.

The moral of this story is that if you have only 1 of a crucial thing, that thing is a single point of failure and represents a vulnerability to you.

Recovering from SPOF vulnerability

There are two basic ways to deal with being vulnerable to single points of failure.

1. The obvious solution is to create redundancies for every part of your system; you make available as many duplicates as you can afford to maintain. (This is sometimes called “mirroring.”) This way, even if some parts of your system are taken offline or if some places featuring your content are blocked, the others will hopefully still be available.
2. The other strategy is to decentralize the system or content itself such that there is no single piece necessary for the other pieces to function; you eliminate single points of failure by making available as many overlapping pieces as you can. In this design, even if some parts of the system or of your content does get censored, enough of it remains available to maintain a cogent message.

A decentralization strategy is not better or worse than one using redundancy, and in fact a hybrid strategy is frequently most effective in most circumstances; both methods offer different advantages and disadvantages. Redundancy is often more expensive and time consuming to make available because everything has to be done multiple times (unless you automate the process), but it can offer greater integrity. On the other hand, decentralization is more often lightweight and versatile but can be far more complex to manage. Here, many small actions are taken by many participants in many places that may seem inconsequential or incomplete when viewed in isolation, but they weave enough of a web—so to speak—to become an agile, even graceful way to move through the world as a whole.

Some common examples of an Internet publisher’s single points of failures are:

• having only one copy of your data (no backups)
• having only one website or contracting with only one web hosting provider;
• registering only one domain name or registering domain names with only one domain registrar;
• hosting your websites in only one country, or state (or other area of legal jurisdiction);
• using only one publishing platform that you do not control (Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

Here’s a super simple example of recognizing a potential single point of failure and avoiding it in a tweet. Do you see it? Using two URL shortening services in one tweet means that if one of the services stops working, people who view this tweet will still be able to get a sense of the examples I’m citing as “GOP fiscal idiocy and moral irresponsibility” via the other shortlink(s).

Similarly, when I publish episodes of my sexuality netcast, Kink On Tap, I post a live, unedited version to Ustream.tv and then post another version to my own website, effectively making a mirror (a copy) of every episode. If KinkOnTap.com should go down, Ustream.tv still has every episode.

Here’s yet another example in which I published an exposé about some shady and unethical technology being used by Internet sex toy retailer EdenFantasys on two of my blogs on different domains. When a commenter expressed concern that I’d receive a cease-and-desist letter from EdenFantasys I suggested that they copy and cross-post my exposé to their own blog, which they did. As more and more copies began appearing online, it became obvious that a cease-and-desist letter would be pointless because the info had spread so far so quickly.

The takeaway here is that the Internet is a copy machine. Since digital copying is so inexpensive, combating Internet censorship is as simple as copying and distributing the censored thing, so censorship itself becomes increasingly expensive.

Diversify your distribution network

Second, you need to do your best to diversify your distribution networks. Herein are two key concepts that we’ve just learned. First, if you only have 1 distribution network, that’s a single point of failure. Secondly, and more importantly, diversity itself is a shorthand for discussing the SPOF response scale because diversity is anathema to censorship.

A distribution network is the infrastructure—the structural system—providing the means by which information flows. This could be a website like Twitter, verbal conversation with friends, or a conference like this one. All strong distribution networks are diverse. To understand why, we can look (conveniently enough) to sex and, specifically, polyamory.

Understanding distribution networks: Polyamory and the Internet, sitting in a tree

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.

As technology theorist Kevin Kelley wrote in his seminal work, “In the network economy, the more plentiful things become, the more valuable they become.” Another way to say essentially the same thing, but from a polyamorous perspective, is “Love is not a scarce commodity,” or, even more generally, “the more, the merrier.” 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.”

So, this “transformation of things from low to high value configurations” is what the polyamory movement does with regards 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.

Unsurprisingly, then, we can look at the evolution of telecommunications to learn about sex-positive movements. A good example is fax machines.

Contrary to popular belief, the facsimile machine was invented in 1843 by a man named Alexander Bain, built from the same things as the telegraph. It was not until 1906, however, that the machines started seeing significant use. Newspapers were the first early adopter because the machines allowed them to send photos across long distances. Next, weather services adopted the technology. Finally, 2 years before ARPANet was introduced, XEROX invented the modern “fax” machine in 1967. Today faxes are still ubiquitous, and they can interface directly with the Internet. There are, for instance, numerous services that translate faxes to emails and vice versa.

Like the Internet, the fax machine had a long incubation period. Moreover, it took millions of today’s dollars to invent the first one, and that machine was utterly useless. It wasn’t until the second one was built that the first one became useful. As more fax machines were built, each one became more valuable.

That’s Metcalfe’s Law: the usefulness of a network equals the square of the number of its users.

Metcalfe's law: the usefulness of a network equals the square of the number of its users.

On a graph, the “incubation period” looks like a long mostly-horizontal line, but then as more devices are added to the network, we see a continually steepening upwards incline. When people talk about the “network effect,” this is the shape they’re talking about. After a network reaches critical mass, as Kevin Kelley put it:

When you buy a fax machine, you are not merely buying a $200 box. Your $200 purchases the entire network of all other fax machines in the world and the connections among them—a value far greater than the cost of all the separate machines.

This works on multiple levels of scale. When we’re talking about it from the perspective of an individual, the “devices” of Metcalfe’s law are humans. Whenever you hear someone saying, “I joined FetLife because all my friends were on it,” what’s happening is that their personal social network—the people they interact with on a regular basis—has hit the critical mass crossover point.

When we’re talking about it from the perspective of a group, or community, then the “devices” are, themselves, communities. When organizers talk about “building coalitions,” what they’re doing is trying to pull their cause towards the critical mass crossover point. Metcalfe’s curve, as it’s known, is what makes large networks hard to resist—regardless of whether that network’s nodes are fax machines, people, or ideas.

When a network gets large enough, it becomes the de-facto infrastructure for the nodes it serves. Just as Facebook has become a de-facto communications substrate for large segments of the Internet-enabled populace, FetLife is fast becoming a de-facto substrate for many sexuality communities, often overshadowing, even replacing prior infrastructure.

Now, before I go any further, it’s important to mention that large networks like Facebook or FetLife are not inherently bad things. From the perspective of an individual node, this feels wonderfully connective. But if we scale up to the perspective of the group’s network itself, we see we’re suddenly alone; using a system that doesn’t offer interoperability, like FetLife for example, we’re unable to interact with other networks.

This is what in-group/out-group, us/them, you-versus-me, thinking looks like. This is how privilege hierarchies are created and recreated time and again. If ignorance is a privilege, then knowledge of this social networking concept is key to creating a socially just world.

Structurally speaking, when combined with the competitive, capitalistic, “every man for himself” ideology, the network effect encourages each large network to create incompatibilities with other networks in order to lock users into their service. In other words, this interplay pushes systems towards structural monoculture; it creates vendor lock-in. And regardless of whether it’s technological, cultural, or social, vendor lock in, as we’ve seen, is a single point of failure.

The only solution I see to this large-scale problem is to weave diversity into the very fabric our lives. That is, we need to systematicize diversity itself. And there’s no better place to start than sex.

Systematicizing sexual diversity

Now that we understand the systemics, improving the system is relatively easy, although it may be easier said than done. All we need to do as individuals is use multiple distribution networks, including as many services purporting to be subject matter-agnostic as possible, and prioritize services that offer interoperability with other networks. Similarly, as a community, we need to prioritize, build and use infrastructure that’s highly interoperable at every opportunity.

For instance, with regard to your own personal distribution network’s structure, I’m suggesting that you use FetLife and Facebook and your own WordPress blog, or whatever other services and platforms you have the resources to utilize. In other words, don’t put all your eggs one basket since this kind of diversification offers redundancy on the distribution network level itself.

Remember Kink On Tap? In addition to multiple copies of the content (my proverbial “eggs”), I was also using my own WordPress-powered blog and a social networking video site called Ustream (my proverbial “baskets”).

My other major project, a national series of sexuality education conferences called KinkForAll, is even more decentralized: it has a Google Group, a FetLife group, and a Facebook group (to name just a few), videos are posted on YouTube and Vimeo, live-blogged event notes are posted to personal blogs all over the ‘net, it has a Twitter account, and even an account on Identi.ca, an open-source Twitter-like clone. Moreover, since other KinkForAll participants independently create and share their own media from events, not even I am a single point of failure. Our own KinkForAll.org website is unusually spartan. To navigate, each upload is marked with a global “KinkForAll” tag as well as an event-specific tag, creating a decentralized yet well-organized multi-media cyber-library out of many small pieces, loosely joined.

In contrast, remember Violet Blue’s “sex-positive link shortener”? Since anything that declares itself sexuality-related becomes a target for censorship, building sexuality-specific infrastructure is a recipe for disaster. When vb.ly was taken offline by the Libyan government, all its short-links ceased to function. Violet had created a single point of failure and, worse, she had created one in the structure of the distribution network itself. That’s why I expressed critical skepticism when Violet launched her website in August, 2009; just as a road doesn’t care if it’s being driven on by a kinky person, Internet infrastructure should be content-neutral, too.

Beyond technicalities, though, publishing to (supposedly) content-neutral services challenges the hostile culture of sex-negative networks. In the last week of July, 2010, Facebook took down the community pages of Self Serve, a women-owned sexuality resource center, and also Violet Blue’s “Our Porn, Ourselves” consciousness-raising campaign page. While this cultural terrorism hurts us, not only will it hurt less the more decentralized our content is, but it also inspires conversation.

From a cultural rather than a technical networking perspective, when you speak up in support of, say, polyamory in a place where no one else is doing it, then as far as this new network is aware, you’re the first fax machine ever invented. It may take time, but when someone joins your monologue (even if they’re initially hostile), you’re suddenly having a dialogue—and that means they just became the second fax machine. Remember Muzi Mei, whose “writings have prompted a raging debate about sex and women on the Internet, where more people are writing blogs or arguing anonymously about a host of subjects in chat rooms and discussion pages.”

Finally, I’m suggesting that for both users of a network, like you and me, as well as creators of networks and networking tools, like Violet Blue and FetLife’s founder, John Baku, interoperability should be prioritized.

For example, I think the single best thing about FetLife is its “Events near me” page, but the single worst thing about it is that none of these events are findable from outside FetLife. Since there’s no way to access FetLife from outside FetLife, it’s like Vegas: what you say on FetLife stays on FetLife. This prevents individuals from, for example, importing event listings to their Google Calendar, something Facebook can do and that makes it more useful for a user.

FetLife is currently incompatible with any other network. In fact, nothing you post to FetLife can so much as be indexed by search engines like Google. This is also culturally dangerous because it nurtures an in-group/out-group mentality among FetLife users. But the “you’re either with us or against us” mindset offers no space either for allies or dissension, so the longer FetLife remains a technological monoculture, the more it becomes a social ghetto.

The online equivalent of dropping a bomb on a ghetto to eradicate a marginalized group of people is seizing or censoring a domain name. In this way, FetLife is to social networking what vb.ly was to link shortening: an easy target. And for a social network, as a network, FetLife isn’t very social. That’s why I think FetLife should work on creating public-facing options for at least three of its major components: journal entries, groups’s discussions, and events.

Not only would this interoperability be a boon for users, when we look at the big picture—at the level of networks themselves—this sort of federation is frequently nothing less than a matter of life or death for marginalized communities. Living in a hostile society, as we do, means we are many small and disparate networks. Even FetLife’s incredible ~775,000 users pales in comparison to Facebook’s ~500 million. Our smartest survival option is therefore to create as many connections as possible between groups: we must become a diverse network of interoperable networks.

As social network developer Evan Prodromou says:

The great thing about federated systems is that anyone can play […b]ut our current social web technologies don’t work like this at all. From the point of view of a typical social web site, if you don’t have an account on that site, you don’t exist. The only way for your friends on that site to interact with you is if they invite you to join the site. Despite the fact that there are hundreds of other social networking sites on the Web, almost every single one works as if there were zero other social networks on the Web.

That approach, especially for sexuality communities, is fundamentally flawed—isolationism is dangerous. To the extent that we are to have sexuality-focused social networks, or sex-positive branded infrastructure, we must federate. We must use tools that interoperate with other tools. And if we don’t demand that we get them from the people who control the large networks that we use, we’re burying our collective head in the sand.

Thankfully, it just so happens that federation, openness, and networking are all very sexual concepts.

Liberate your data

Lastly, you need to liberate your data. On the one hand, this simply means using services that don’t keep you and your content walled off from the rest of the world like a jealous lover, as we’ve just seen. In the words of DataPortability Project steering committee member Drummond Reed, this means that, You can read it, write it, or move it somewhere else—all under your control, using the tool, program, or service of your choice.

On the other hand, though, it means not acting like that jealous lover towards your own data in the first place. Since both the Internet and love function on the principle that abundance is more valuable than scarcity, loving your online content means setting it free. Have you ever heard someone say “don’t steal my idea”? This sentiment doesn’t make sense because ideas are free, and data—indeed, all technology—is simply a collection of ideas.

When computer networking professionals are “promiscuous,” they’re not being slutty—at least, not in the sexual sense. Instead, they’re configuring their network cards to let them see all the communication happening on a network. But transposing sex onto technology makes a lot of sense because technology evolves in exactly the same way humans do; using sexual reproduction.

As a sexual species, a human baby inherits the genes from both its parents’s lineages. But humans are not merely sexual creatures in a physical sense, we are sexual creatures in an intellectual sense, too. The way we share our genes to make new babies exactly mirrors the way we share our ideas to make new technology. Just as biological organisms evolve and they become more diverse, specialized, complex, and social, so too does technology evolve.

The easier you make it for your ideas to meet and, indeed, to mate with those of others, the more value you both will get from them. More to the point, however, the more your ideas “have sex” with other people’s ideas, the more diverse your idea distribution network will be.

Speed dating for ideas

When it comes to helping your ideas have cyber-sex, there are a few easy things you can do.

First, get out of the house. Have an idea? Talk about it online, on a blog, in a tweet, to a friend in email, anywhere that gets your idea out of your head and onto the Internet. In other words, publish, publish, publish.

Second, get socializing. When you publish, link liberally. Link to your own, prior content, and link back to the content that inspired yours. Speak URLs in audio recordings like podcasts so listeners can “follow” those, too. The more you link—the more connections you make—the more possibilities you offer others to interact with you.

Third, be yourself. Be sure to make your own source files available, if you can. In other words, open source your content. For instance, all artwork for KinkForAll, from icon designs to door signs, to promotional materials like print-ready flyers and postcards, is made available for free in their original file format. When possible, I convert proprietary formats to standardized ones that are more interoperable, such as turning simple PhotoShop images to SVG ones. I do the same thing with presentations like this one; browse my website and you can download all the assets that I used to make this presentation with one click.

And finally, be up-front, honest and open. Explicitly license your content permissively so that your content is legally attractive to others. You can use any of the Creative Commons licenses to keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit—hopefully with a link back to your site! I sourced most of the imagery you saw in this presentation in exactly this way. Again, KinkForAll goes even further, expressly putting all shared resources into the public domain.

None of us were ever meant to work, or live, or love completely alone. In the end, we need one another—and we need others who aren’t the same as we are. And when different people like your ideas, and then make copies of your work, they’re helping you stay one step ahead of the censors.

As I once heard said, “unprotected speech leads to brain babies,” and that means “epiphanies are orgasmic brain baby conception moments.” I hope I at least gave you a cerebrorgasm or two. :) Thanks for coming to my seminar.

• The most exciting (by far) find of the week for me was Reverend Debra W. Haffner’s blog titled Sexuality and Religion: What’s the connection?. Debra is also the founder of The Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing and to many people’s surprise despite the name, that does not mean they advocate solely abstinence-only education, anti-abortion political agendas, or rigidly define the sanctity of marriage in a sexist (solely heterosexual) way. Debra is a breath of fresh air in and from a direction that sorely needs it. In a recent post regarding teen pregnency, Debra writes:
  

  The U.S. continues to have the highest teen birth rate in the developed world. Our teenagers need their parents to educate them about sexuality; our faith communities must address adolescent sexuality; our schools must provide comprehensive sexuality education; sexually active teens must have access to reproductive health services. That’s what happens in other countries that have a teen birth rate much lower than our’s…that’s what we need to do here.

  I’m so happy that she’s speaking out, and even more grateful for her advocacy.

• Another recent and interesting addition to the portion of the blogosphere I watch is the sweet submissive man who writes at Unspeakable Axe. His blog chronicles many of his attempts at finding dominant women and, sadly, he is a perfect example of the kind of nice guys out there who just can’t find submissive sexual fulfillment despite all their efforts. He writes about women who expect money even after financial transactions were already negotiated out,
  

  “How much can you pay?” she asked.

  “What? Nothing. I don’t pay for play so why would I pay to meet?”.

  I almost sounded dominant. She knew that I wasn’t looking for that, why would she even suggest it?

  “Really? Ok well maybe we can just be friends then. You’re cute so I’ll let you meet me for free and maybe you can clean my apartment.”

  I was glad we were on the phone, otherwise she would have seen me roll my eyes at her.

  And he writes about women who use submissives like him for an easy ego-boost:
  

  I know what she’s doing. Whenever she needs to feel wanted or desired she calls me. She constantly gets my hopes up only to cancel at the last minute. She’ll talk about wanting me to sleep at the foot of her bed chained and used just to get me excited. Then she’ll cancel hours before meeting. Over and over we’ve played this dance. She’s probably canceled close to a dozen times.

  And even about women who don’t want an eager submissive, but a challenging alpha-male type to break:
  

  She enjoys making a man do something he wouldn’t normally do, she loves the challenge. With me, there’s no challenge, she knows I’ll eagerly submit to her desires and because of that I’m no use to her. She made several comments about how there’s nothing hotter than making a man submit who normally wouldn’t.

  Though I’ve been saying it to her forever, it took Eileen to start reading Axe’s blog before she finally fully understood the extent at which submissive men long for something we are only rarely able to find. Thanks to the simplicity with which Axe writes and the personal stories he tells, he can make the problems submissive men face when trying to find opportunities for play partners that are satisfying exceptionally, heart-wrenchingly painful—even if you’re not a submissive man. I think his has now become a must-read blog, so it’s been added to my blog roll.

• Richard Evans Lee, whom I know primarily from Down On My Knees and as a moderator of Fetish Lore (a BDSM-focused discussion board) has a new project up at FemaleLedRelationships.Net. To my eyes, in much the same way as “pro-life” is a term that has been co-opted to mean “anti-abortion” by conservatives, the term “female led relationships” has been co-opted to signify a specific brand of narrow-minded and harmful relationships involving female sexual domination of men. Richard is taking back the phrase by writing insightful, targeted posts about various topics of female domination as only he can so eloquently do. You’ll find this on my blog roll now, too.
• Isn’t That Special? is one of Mistress Matisse’s articles for her regularly appearing column, Control Tower in The Stranger, a Seattle-based newspaper. It is also an incredibly brief (500-some-odd words) and incredibly poignant piece that relates a classic misunderstanding that can occur in polyamorous relationships to riding a bike. From the article:
  

  Pat’s emotional crisis is of his own creation. He took an arbitrary symbol—”Chris sleeps with only me”—and gave that one symbol a lot of power. He made it the solitary litmus test of whether his relationship with Chris was stable and safe. People do this because it’s simpler than having to really examine themselves and their feelings. It’s basically replacing sexual monogamy with some other symbol. But as long as you assign power to symbolism rather than what’s real, then you’re mistaking the form of love for the substance. Sleeping with Pat is not what makes Chris love him and treat him as special.

  In other words, go read it right now. Mistress Matisse is, in general, an excellent writer and worth a look herself. She also keeps a blog.

• Finally, even though it often has little to do with sex directly, I want to point readers to the incredible wealth of knowledge and inspiration that is available for free at the TED Talks Video Blog. Many of these are must-see videos that are not only eye-opening, but truly unique, beautiful and touching stories as well. Some of my favorites are Sir Ken Robinson’s talk about education and intelligence, Steven Pinker’s talk explaining the intricacies of human thought through an analysis of how we use language (with direct implications for understanding sexuality!), Peter Donnely’s talk about common but tragic mistakes due to misunderstanding statistics, Mena Trott’s talk about how blogging is changing the world by making the personal important, Jimmy Wales’s talk about why and how Wikipedia works as well as it does, Helen Fischer’s talk explaining the science behind love (also with direct implications for understanding sexuality!), Barry Schwartz’s talk about the paradox of choice and how it relates to happiness, and Eve Ensler’s understanding of happiness through the exploration of vaginas and so, so many more.

Everything is, in the end, related to everything else; it’s all connected, even if you can’t see how just yet. One of the things I am wishing for myself in 2008 is a greater ability to be at peace with myself in those times when I see that I can’t see something. That would be true vision.

• Hostility towards bisexual-identified people, most confusingly from gay- and lesbian-identified people.
• A lack of cohesion and inertia in the bisexual community, who often identify with some other community instead (gay, lesbian, kinky, poly, etc.).
• The harm that is caused by a simplistic understanding of communication, particularly when using language.

These topics are of obvious interest to me because they each affect my social spaces. One of the more startling findings of the poll is that there are apparently more than twice as many bisexual women as there are bisexual men. Or at least, of course, more than twice as many that feel comfortable identifying themselves as such in this poll.

The poll of 768 people, conducted last month, shows in its adjusted final tally that 15.4 percent of respondents are bisexual men and 33.5 percent are bisexual women.

In my personal experience this ratio is even more skewed, but I’m willing to give this finding some credence. To be brain-dead simplistic about the issue, one can say that women who identify as bisexual have an easier time of coming out about it because they just don’t face criticisms from as many fronts as men who identify as bisexual do. Specifically, bisexual women are stereotypically stigmatized only by lesbians, whereas bisexual men are stigmatized by both gay men and by straight men.

One of my strongest dissatisfactions with many of the gay men I’ve interacted with is their blindness towards gender fluidity and how that affects eroticism. This is perhaps one reason why I find myself having trouble finding these men sexy after they open their mouths. They seem so singularly focused on their own version of the masculine ideal that they ignore what I find to be important pieces of my femininity that are necessary to my own erotic fulfillment. The exceptions are the gay men who seem to enjoy femme-y boys, but even in these instances coming out as bisexual seemed to disqualify me to them.

“It’s sad to me that gays and lesbians have such a hard time standing by their bi brothers and sisters,” she said, “because we are really in this fight together, about having our love lives and families validated and respected, no matter what gender we love.”

On the flip side, I have intense trouble socializing with straight men. Consistently, the only straight men who I seem to be able to get along with are the ones who are either sensitive to issues of gender or sexuality (such as those already involved in a sexuality community) or those with whom I can talk technology. When my coworkers invited me out to bars, I declined because the conversation would not have been technology as it was (by necessity) in the office, and that would have quickly become uncomfortable.

In other words, sex is social. That’s a concept I want to explore in further depth later on, but for now suffice it to say that for people with a sex drive, an element of social interactions is sexuality, whether they realize it or not.

Another major issue this article touches upon is the fact that there are very few organized bisexual communities in comparison to other sexuality communities, and that the ones that do exist are fairly small. The most striking example of this was that at the last New York City LGBT Pride March, the bisexual contingent had a grand total of four (4!) people marching in it.

Even the BDSM contingent, who typically have one of the smallest groups in the parade (not including the “leather” sections, though I’m still confused as to why BDSM is contained within leather instead of the other way around), always have at least a dozen people or more marching with them. To be fair, I marched with the BDSM group instead of the bisexual group, and therein lies an example of the lack of visibility of the bisexual community.

I think that, by our nature, almost every one of us holds some other label equally important to us as the bisexual label. I am not just bisexual, I’m kinky, too. Most bisexual men I know are not just bisexual, they’re also polyamorous.

As a result of this multi-focal sexuality (“I like this and this…oh, and this too!”), it’s sometimes difficult for bisexual people to be taken seriously. The common argument is that we just haven’t “chosen” yet, but sooner or later, after enough experience and time, we’ll “settle down” into one of the all-or-nothing choices. (This is the same problem switches have in the BDSM scene: “you’re not really a switch, you’re either a top or a bottom and you just don’t know yet.”)

This point of view is no different from hetero-normative thinking, because it is founded on the principles of mutual exclusion. “You can’t be this and that.” Looking at sexuality this way treats such concepts as attraction as though they are finite resources, as if by being attracted to men you can not possibly have enough “spare attraction” to also be attracted to women, or that if you do then the attraction is lessened in direct proportion to how much attraction you have “spent” elsewhere.

I believe people think this way because they are confusing the things that do, in fact, have limited availability, such as time and physical energy, with things that do not, in fact, have any arbitrary limit. Am I the only person to whom confusing these sorts of things sounds absolutely insane?

Moreover, the idea that this insanity also holds true of language is equally absurd:

“There are plenty of lesbians in the gay community who occasionally sleep with men and still call themselves lesbians and vice versa. People need to start being honest in their daily lives about their actual behaviors rather than hiding behind convenient black-and-white labels that breed acceptance from their gay and lesbian peers who often condemn bisexuality.”

In other words, according to Nicole Kristal, who is quoted from the article above and who is a co-author of The Bisexual’s Guide to the Universe, you’re not a lesbian if you’re a woman who also sleeps with men. This is the equivalent of saying “you’re not a woman if you have a penis,” and we already know how ignorant confusing sex with gender identity is.

Ultimately, what this quote spotlights is the importance of understanding language as a tool for communication. The other day, a friend shared an awesome quote from Confucius with me that she read:

When words lose their meaning, people will lose their liberty.

She told me,

I read something today and thought of you immediately. Apparently, Confucius believed that correct usage of words was a prerequisite to working society. When words stopped being connected to specific meanings, he believed that it was a sign of the impending corruption and collapse of civilization. I like that way of looking at it, [but] I had never heard it put that way before.

It is for that reason why academics like Robert Heasley work so hard at providing a vocabulary with which to discuss things like masculinity, and why people like me work so hard at using such vocabularies to define distinctions between things. Doing so hones our understanding of the meanings of words, which fights rhetoric and propaganda in the process. In the war on sex currently being waged, language is the ultimate weapon.

As his posts usually do these days, this post of Figleaf’s got me thinking about personal needs, how we provide for those needs, and how those needs become needs in the first place. In it, he says:

Just as we indoctrinate men to strive so mightily to provide that they/we never come home, so we also indoctrinate women so thoroughly to believe men won’t even see them unless they’re starved, then scraped bare, then repainted that some of them/you are afraid to be seen by your partners after a night of roaringly good sex. The real thresholds for being sexy, being a good provider, being a man or a woman, are surprisingly easy to meet. However to embody sexiness, or worthiness, or manliness, or femininity is a fools errand[…]

(His thought-provoking post was inspired by none other than this eloquent post of Calico’s, which is also worth a read. So are the rest of both their blogs, by the way, which each have posts that are almost always equally eloquent.)

Acquiring an accurate understanding of my personal needs has always been the central focus of my life and, sadly, I fear that I still have a long way to go. Having needs that are (or, equally bad, feel as though they are) unfulfilled is the obvious source of a lot of sadness, anger, resentment and jealousy in my life.

When it comes to social and sexual relationships, in fact, jealousy is the word most often associated by most people to indicate a lack of fulfillment of some need in some way. This explains why the polyamorous community and their resources, writings, and issues seem to deal squarely with discovering personal needs and understanding the needs of one’s partners in order to overcome that jealousy.

When reading Figleaf’s observation that men are indoctrinated “to strive so mightily to provide” I saw myself in his words. In most typical instances, what men are indoctrinated to provide is “a living” for their family, which in more concrete terms is often defined by mainstream gender roles as “a dependable source of financial income for the nuclear family unit.” Everyone knows that it’s the man’s job to bring home the bacon, and he’s expected to sacrifice everything—his time, his happiness, his independence, his freedoms, and ultimately himself—in the pursuit of this noble, self-sacrificing, almost holy endeavor.

This is masochism perverted into martyrdom—”no pain, no gain.”

Indeed, there can easily be satisfaction and emotional fulfillment to be found from this goal. I have always absolutely loved to buy Eileen dinner, or treats at Starbucks, or spontaneous gifts—big gifts like several-hundred-dollar jewelry—or to treat the two of us to a night at the movies. All of this all on my dime. I enjoy that because my dime signifies my hard work and spending money on the things that make me happy is something I’ve earned.

Something that makes me happy is providing good experiences to Eileen, which is also the cornerstone of many components of submission. Feeling as though I am capable to provide good experiences for my partner is one thing that is necessary for me to feel submissive. This relationship between being submissive and being a provider and each of their connection to masculinity is most obvious in service-related kinks (sissy-maids and men-turned-”homemakers” are two prime examples that come to mind), and equally obvious in stamina-related kinks (in which men are tortured but, because they are MEN! GRR! they do not whimper or scream and only display a stoic pride), both of which is the (frustratingly) universal representation of male submission everywhere.

Could this be the root of men’s “chivalrous nature”? We are certainly taught that chivalry is a good thing. These activities and the feelings that come from them is both the hegemonic masculine view of how a man should behave towards a woman and an accurate description, at least in parts, of how I want to feel about the way I treat my partners, men and women alike (though the expression of this is, interestingly, different in my relations with men than they are with women).

And that, now that I think about it, may be the first time on this blog in which I have actually described myself as fitting nicely into the masculine gender role stereotype.

Moreover, there’s nothing wrong with this that I can see. Providing for another person makes me happy, and it simultaneously makes me feel strong. Is this not, in fact, the epitome of the knight submissive concept? The knight submissive is a representation of a man who is at once powerful, who uses this power in a way that is courageous, honorable, and makes the lives of those he chooses to effect better, and yet—contrary to the accepted display of hegemonic masculinity—is also submissive to his partner. One might even say he is dominated by his partner, or perhaps in other words that may provide for more insight, is guided, steered, or advised by his partner.

In other words, “behind every good man, there is a good woman.” To me, this sounds as though the knight submissive is the hegemonic masculine man that women read about in romance novels.

Only, because gender stereotypes are idealized versions of atomic characteristics of gender and the masculine gender role has been elected as “the one who provides” whereas the feminine gender role has been elected as “the one who needs,” men are disallowed from needing and women are disallowed from providing—period. End of story.

The classic examples provide evidence of this dichotomy in abundance. What happens if the wife of a heterosexual married couple makes more money than the husband? Suddenly, the husband feels bad because his perceived “manliness” is threatened since she provides more financial income to their family unit than he does. What happens if the wife has a love affair? Again, negative feelings and a perceived threat to his manliness because he is not the one providing her with sexual satisfaction and some other (presumably) man is. This is even true in the way many conservative men respond to vibrators, or, god forbid, pornography intended to be consumed by women.

Any remotely emotionally functional individual will recognize that this system in which women only need and men only provide is harmful to both men and women. Women are expected to need only what men can provide and men are expected not to need anything except, of course, the needs of women. Thanks to the prevailing viewpoint that monogamy is the One True Way to Love® this set of needs is further restricted to include only, for women, the things your one man can provide and, for men, the needs of your one woman.

I see it as self-evident that both men and women have component needs that are irrelevant to their specific partner(s). In other words, a need is intrinsically born of oneself, not of one’s partner. Otherwise, whose need is it, really? Academically, this concept seems as though it can, broadly speaking, be contained within the greater need for self-actualization.

It seems nothing if not utterly ridiculous to function day by day under the rigid and false pretense that only a traditional understanding of the gender model allows. There’s simply no way that I can see being able to squeeze fulfillment and happiness out of being a man whose sole need is to fulfill all his other partner’s needs because, obviously, need-fulfillment is by my earlier definition not actually possible to obtain from a single source. It may, perhaps, be possible and even healthy to seek to fulfill the specific needs of a partner that can be fulfilled by other people, but ultimately there is going to be something, no matter how small that your partner is going to have to do on their own to feel fully fulfilled. (And, if you’ll take a word from the wise, it’s never something that small.)

That piece, no matter how much you or I strive to provide it, being the good, otherwise capable, and self-sacrificing men that we are, is not ever something we can succeed in. Not recognizing that fact leads invariably to codependency of one form or another and then, inevitably, to unhappiness in at least something, be it our work, our social partnerships (of which sexuality and pair-bonding is a form), or—worst of all in my opinion—one’s ability to think effectively and to make good personal choices in one’s private life.

In other words, by focusing so strongly on the experience of our partners, men end up being unable—forbidden, even!—to live our own lives. We need, as a friend said wisely to me the other day, to find a way to disconnect from the experience of our partners, but not disconnect from our partners themselves.

Finding submission with Eileen, for me, has been a major component in being able to connect with another person on a sexual (and thus at least one piece of a social) level that, finally, feels good, and right, and fulfilling. Being submissive meets one of my needs—specifically the need to have fulfilling social interactions. However, in becoming submissive, I must also allow myself the freedom to disconnect from her experience, to allow her the capability to provide for her own needs.

Submission, or masculinity or being a “man”, is not in reality the rigid, narrow thing society tells us being a man is. Being a man is not about providing everything for our partners. It can be about providing for them, but it’s also about providing for ourselves. And guess what? That’s what being a woman is about, too.

Perhaps this should be three separate posts, but whatever. In preparation for Floating World, Jefferson from over on One Life, Take Two has asked for some reader participation. The topics are absolutely fascinating so I couldn’t help but offer my input:

1) Do you blog about sex? Let me know your site, your reasons forblogging, and your experiences as a blogger.

My experiences blogging are somewhat unusual because I have been blogging since before it was called blogging. Back in 1995, I set up a web site for bipolar youth on which I kept a semi-regular running journal. I was 12 or so at the time. My life since then is a remarkably open book. I find that blogging is one of the key techniques I use to maintain self-awareness and self-observation. I do this about sex, but I also do this about friends and family life, social events, and my work life. Making things public just makes things more accessible. I’ve gotten correspondence from people and have friends I would not have had other wise. To date, I’ve never experienced a profoundly negative effect from public blogging.

I keep getting warned that one day this is going to bite me, and you know what, maybe it will. But I’ve already gained so much from my own openness that it seems like a silly thing to fear the potential backlash of the future. I am much stronger now anyway, more confident but also more of a success in other people’s eyes. It becomes very difficult, I believe, to point at someone and say “You’re bad because of this or that” when you are presented with all the other things they have done that you don’t have any problem with.

Those of you who only read this blog may not know about the other topics I write about elsewhere, and those people will probably not wander on over here to read about kink and BDSM. As a result, while I am just one voice, I am a voice for many things. It’s that kind of diversity that gives people their strength and which makes it hard to demonize any one aspect of a person’s life.

2) What are your experiences with male bisexuality? I’m interested in your personal experiences as well as those involving friends, lovers and/or communities. Anyone is welcome to reply; you needn’t be bisexual or identify as male to have an opinion or experience to relate.

I’m a bisexual guy. Bisexuality is hard: there is very little community identity because I don’t know of any bisexual guys (or girls?) who are *only* bisexual. Everyone is bi but also kinky or heavily involved in LGBT activism (from which I’ve noticed the B and the T get dropped very frequently), or something else such as polyamory. Indeed, I am guilty of this myself. It’s been to my own detriment, in fact, because while I strongly desire male-male experiences I have been focused elsewhere.

It doesn’t help that community norms typically marginalize male bisexuality, and it is infuriating that female bisexuality is actually expected to be par for the course. (First because, hey, I want some of that same-sex action, too, and secondly because don’t you think this is completely unfair to the women who aren’t interested in other women?) I often shy away from meeting gay men because all too often they dismiss my homosexual interests as merely a passing fad. Or sometimes the reverse case, where my heterosexual interests are inauthentic. To this I say that they have clearly not been reading their own “liberation” material.

Furthermore, the notion of claiming a bisexual identity because it is the cool thing to do, annoyingly dubbed “bi chic” and thankfully not nearly so big a social stigma anymore as it was in the mid-1990′s, casts nothing but more shadow over an already veiled identity. Conversely, there is the popular notion of “forced bi”, wherein self-declared straight men have irresistable fantasies about being forced into sexual encounters with other men. (Oh, and that’s another thing that pisses me off: guys who say they are bi for the sole purpose of getting women. But that’s a whole ‘nother rant.) When I was in high school and trying to understand what my body was telling me, I struggled for longer than I’d like to admit with the binary idea that I was either gay or straight, but that bisexuality was not an option.

What is it about such black-and-white simplicity that is so attractive to so many people? It’s easy, but it’s false. Once again, the diversity and fluidity of my gender identity is extremely important to me, and is something I think is actually a healthy thing for everybody to have an understanding about.

3) What are your experiences and interests on g spot and p spotstimulation? Do you enjoy them? Are you frustrated by an inability tolocate them, or to stimulate them?

Kind of dovetailing off the last item, one of the reasons why I am a little hard-up for male-male action is because I absolutely love receiving anal sex. This is primarily because the prostate stimulation is so intense for me. Maybe I’m just wired differently than most people (though I doubt it), but prostate stimulation is so incredibly spot-on (no pun intended), that I am convinced it’s one of the most perfect developments in the natural world.

I’ve never had any problem stimulating my prostate. I’ve been doing so as a regular part of masturbation since my very early adolescent years (about 11 or so). I started by first pressing my fingers into my perineum and gently rubbing across it. Eventually I began to anally penetrate myself with my fingers. Thank goodness for flexibility! When I masturbate this way, I feel like orgasm approaches much, much quicker than it would otherwise. It’s a wonderful addition to sexual play, one I enjoy a lot. I’ve since bought toys specifically for this purpose, such as the aneros helix. At times, it’s actually difficult for me to avoid ejaculating when sexual stimulation is supplemented with prostate stimulation. When I met my current partner, Eileen, we quickly took to strap-on sex in part for this reason.

However, another aspect to our prostate stimulation playtime actually stems from our orgasm control and chastity kinks. Prostate stimulation is a central part of many submissive men’s chastity regimes for reasons of perceived prostatic health. In addition, the incredible arousal I experience when my prostate is stimulated makes me super horny. Eileen calls it “stoking my fire” when she fingers me. It’s very effective for sexual teasing because many men, myself included, can’t ejaculate powerfully via prostate stimulation alone if they can even reach orgasm at all. The net result is that I get more horny, but can’t relieve my arousal. That, of course, is the point.

When Eileen and I were talking about our positive weekend experiences with others, one thing that has stuck in my head that she’s mentioned is that she said she felt good about the experiences in part because she, “felt like [she] was giving [our friends] a new toy — you.” This struck a chord because that was so much the feeling I got that I was glad she felt it too. In fact, our friends felt similarly!

To make the feeling even more blunt, a week before we had purchased a little gold dog tag at Petco (ahh, one of the many pervertible stores in the city) and placed it on my collar. The collar reads, appropriately enough, “Property of Eileen” and makes a lovely little jingling noise when I shake my head. This thing feeds directly into my human pet fantasies and I’ve been crushing hard on it ever since we got it. (Note to kinksters on a budget: for God’s sake, go visit Petco! Not to mention the fact that this tag really enhances puppy play scenarios!)

I liked feeling as though I were being given to our friends for the night. Eileen went so far as to give them the option of letting me orgasm (or not) once and once only that night. The combination of these things had put me deep into a headspace of feeling owned. The funny thing about it all was that this feeling was around even while spending the night and, wonderfully, it didn’t impede or hamper the activities at all. I was still EIleen’s, but I was there with our friends. I think this worked so well, at least in part, because they not only understood, but enjoyed the dynamic as well.

This experience makes me want to dig deeper into exploring feelings of ownership and, beyond that, of being shared.

And you know what? We both really enjoyed ourselves during our time apart and—more to the point—enjoyed coming back home to sleep and cuddle together on our own bed.

The other night when Eileen’s old (and new?) flame was leaving, he said, “I thought you’d be all mean,” which surprised me some. Later, she expained to me, “It’s understandable; one reason he was coming in to the city was to hook up with your girlfriend after all.” That makes sense, but being mean was never on my radar.

It made me feel good to hear about the good times they shared, and it made me happy to be asked about the details of my night with our friends. I think I can finally be optimistic about our relationship’s poly standing again. That’s a really good thing.

“Really? Thanks,” I said. This reaction clearly surprised my friend because he stopped dead in his tracks and looked at me quizically.

“Thanks? I just told you what amounts to ‘I’ll have sex with you’ in our scene, and I’m straight!” he said.

“Is playing really the same thing as having sex with someone?” I asked.

I think it’s still a good question. The distinction between sex and BDSM play is often a funny one. Some people insist there is no difference, some people insist the two should be distinct and always separated, other people insist one is the other, and I’ve gone through so many different phases I forgot what I think right now. I do know, however, that never before in my life have I so closely linked playing with sexual activities and that is a direct result of Eileen’s influences and our opportunities for play.

Case in point, the entire kink of orgasm denial is intensely sexual. It’s not something I’ve ever done—or even mentioned, actually—to anyone I knew in person until I met Eileen. Thankfully, she broke the ice on the matter. I was all too happy to let the floodgates open.

Today, teasing and denial (or T&D as it’s sometimes known to those of us for whom it’s a common kink) is a central and integral part of not only our relationship but of our life. After all, how could something so fundamental as the freedom of sexual gratification not affect your life when you begin to play kinky games with it?

Which brings me to the point of sex and kink, and what lines, if any, are drawn between these things. It’s obviously a very gray space, very few bits offering themselves as either black or white. Each person has their own take, informed by their personal interests and kinks.

A good friend of mine has recently confessed to wanting to top me. This, I think, is awesome, both because I think we would have a great time but also because I have never actually seen her switch with her boyfriend and would love the opportunity to do so. Of course, this was just a remark and I don’t intend to read too much into it, but it did get me thinking. Is wanting to top me the same thing as wanting to, in some form or capacity, have sex with me, even if the sex is limited to something as commonplace as mentally undressing someone in your mind’s eye? I’ll confess to having had such thoughts myself.

It also wouldn’t actually be the first time. About a year and a half ago, Eileen and two of her close friends (who are also my friends in their own right now, and yayness for that!) all triple-topped me one night in a very mild, practically introductory sort of breath play. I think if we were to actually play together again, it might help her if Eileen was there for part of it, or all of it, at least at first.

Of course, all of this needs a roundtable discussion, as is—and I believe should be—the way of things.