Wednesday, January 16, 2008

The Selfish Highlight Reel: Rhode Island Fetish Flair Flea-market Recap

Category labels: Community, Emotions, Kink events, Myths and misconceptions, Personal experience, Pet play, Puppy play, Sex toys, Uncategorized, Vanilla life, Wednesday Wanderings, Writing and blogging

Almost a week and I haven’t posted nary a word in either posts nor comments. What is going on? Despite the praise—which is lovely and makes me feel good, and useful, and accomplished—I have no altruistic goals for my writing, no illusions of where my motivation to keep this blog going stems from.

In case it hasn’t become common knowledge yet, in exactly four weeks I will be leaving the United States on a jet plane headed towards Sydney, Australia, where I will be living for at least the following year. This marks the very first time in my life when I will not have lived in New York City. In fact, it marks the only time in my life when I’ll have to call some location outside of the island of Manhattan my home.

I’m so excited, I can’t wait. But I’m also going to miss so many people and things about New York City and the East coast in general so, so much. In this last month in the States, I don’t expect to be writing every day anymore, and would like to echo the things Eileen said about the stress of moving.

But it’s Wednesday, and I want to keep the commitments I make to myself, so I wanted to post a Wednesday Wanderings link-fest for everyone reading. This Wednesday Wanderings post is going to be a little different because instead of wandering all over cyberspace this past week, I wandered around meatspace. Specifically, I went to the Rhode Island Fetish Fair Flea-market.

Part of the goal for this blog—making myself feel more visible, more heard, more seen, and more listened to—has been a major success. People are finding their own kinds of value in what I have to say, and they do so by finding their own motivations for listening in the first place.

Going to NELA’s Rhode Island Fetish Fair Flea-market this past weekend felt very much like that. I decided to go at the last minute, for my own reasons, to turn the event into an opportunity for personal exploration and experimentation of a sort I choose to keep my own, for now. I had some successes, some pain, some very frustrating dashed expectations, and some disappointments, so it was not the sort of spectacular experience some people might expect it to be. That said, I’m glad I went, and I don’t think I did too badly on my own.

The Flea’s primary purpose for me, an opportunity to practice (among other things) taking the bad with the good without Eileen present was something I accomplished in the end. As I mentioned, for now I choose not to show you (all) the bad parts. I don’t want to talk about them right now, especially since I’ve covered lots of them before.

It should come as no surprise to long-time readers how frustrated I am with the persistence that women’s bodies are the sole subject for fetish photography and how combative I feel around asshat mandoms. The Flea had its fair share of these things.

I’ve been to this Winter event two times before and each time it felt like, well, like going to a kink event. This time, however, it felt far more like I was just going to Providence to see some friends, who all happened to be congregating at a kink event. That was much, much more fun.

I didn’t make it to a single class or workshop. I never made it through the entryway of the Fetish Art Show, even though I passed by the entrance at least a dozen times. I didn’t make a single significant purchase, though I did pick up a small, spontaneous gift for Eileen that I’m hoping gets used on me soon. And I’m not at all disappointed about any of those things.

I do wish I had gotten to spend more one-on-one time with my friends, especially Switch, whose insightful self-reflection was the source of my original motivation to attend the event in the first place.

Switch and I travelled to Providence with Dov on Saturday morning who, like both of us, had made similar last-minute plans to attend two days before. Conversations with Dov are always at least entertaining and at their best are very interesting. At the Flea, we couldn’t walk more than five feet in any direction without one of us stopping to say hello to someone we knew. Midori was vending near the entrance to the infamously gigantic vendor’s area, so she was one of the first people Dov stopped to talk with, and he introduced her to Switch. (I just said a brief hello.)

It wasn’t long after that when Switch and I met up with my good friends Maja and Týr, the marvelous Mischief and the enchanting Estra, as well as a few of our other friends without blog names. Together, we swept through the vending area at least three times over. I also said hello to David King, maker of the excellent Coyote Whips single tails, was introduced to Leah and Scott of Big Head Studios, and waved to Hilton manning the Purple Passion booth.

Eventually, after also connecting with Calico, the group of us went to the Bondage Lounge, where we hung out with Sascha, and I spent a fun few minutes as Switch’s ball of human and hemp.

Later, our group swelled to ever larger proportions, including the addition of yet-more-non-blog-people. Also included in the mix was a specific attractive and dominant woman who I was very happy to get to see again—and whom I hope to be able to see more of in the very near future—but unfortunately didn’t get quite as much time to speak with as I would have liked. (You know who you are; I’d rather not call you out by name without prior notice, though if that’s something you wouldn’t mind then I’d be happy to do so from now on.) Eventually we all made it to dinner in spite of a wait well over an hour.

At the hotel room, emotional issues struck at night alongside insomnia of sorts. None of us got much sleep, but the conversation with Switch was heartening and was the highlight of my day, however mixed it was with exhaustion and other sadness.

The next day back at the Flea-market, I was happy to get the chance to meet the brilliant blogger from over on Kink in Exile, who has finally returned from physical “exile” and is back on the East coast just in time for us to cross paths. The two of us wandered around a bit, and I got introduced to some of her friends, like Mr. Pet (who makes incredible custom couture pieces), Steve of Circlet Press, and a few others who also don’t have public blogosphere identities.

I also had the pleasure of seeing Margaret, the absolutely unabashedly, astonishingly adorable founder of Wolf Princess Designs, a company that sells vegan sex accessories for the extremely enjoyable niche of human animal roleplay (aka. pet play). The fact that I’m not going to get the opportunity to get to know Margaret better is one of the reasons I’m sad to be leaving New York City. Not that opportunities were abundant seeing as how I’m from New York City and she’s based in Providence, but still.

After Kink in Exile and I finished making the rounds, I reconnected with Switch over at Monk’s booth to find her literally tied to Maja. Dov snapped a few pictures as Týr’s massive frame provided a background that would hide other people from the camera, an important thing to be careful of at kink events.

I took the opportunity created by the impromptu bondage photo shoot to speak with Monk’s self-described Twisted Mentat, Alex. I had a thoroughly enjoyable conversation about Seattle, the scene there, and stuff to do there, with her, as well as shared a few words on each other’s personal history, and (of course) bondage, hemp rope, and all the fun things you can do with it.

For me, getting to meet Monk—but especially getting to speak with Alex—was probably the best thing about the whole vendor’s area. As it turns out, I might get the opportunity to actually visit Seattle for few days in early February, so making a good local connection ahead of time was simply wonderful. That, and Alex is clearly full of awesome: outgoing and outspoken, energetic and fun.

Unlike me, Monk and Alex were at the Flea on business and so I tried not to get in the way of the constant flow of customer’s questions. Instead, I spoke with Viviane, and then to Rita Seagrave. I was very happy, and flattered, that Rita made it a point to say hello to me (and to compliment me on this blog! Thank you, Rita!) because her own writing is filled with intelligent observations just as mine is, but it’s also polished into some of the most evocative poetry and prose-poetry I’ve ever come across, and I really admire her communicative ability in that style. If you haven’t yet peeked at some of Rita’s blog, you should.

And that, as they say, was that. The overall uneventful affair was ended with some fond farewells and retracing most of my steps back to the city, with a stop to see Boy for just a couple hours along the way.

The takeaway from it all is this: kink is not some kind of magical mystery tour, some alien or foreign experience devoid of the mundane and—gasp!—normal human interaction. For many people, especially the vendors, kink is a part of the daily grind, and is remarkable largely for its unremarkable quality. And I guess that’s really what I wanted to add to my blog when I started writing this entry.

My writing is typically full of the extraordinary, of the moments of epiphany and none of the drudgery of the thought process, of the sex without the foreplay. Of course, this has been by design. I want readers to come here with the expectation that they’ll get their proverbial rocks off, a reliable orgasm (metaphorically or otherwise) with minimal personal effort.

However, this blog is just the selfish highlight reel.

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Thursday, June 21, 2007

On Ownership and Sharing

Category labels: D/s dynamics, Femdom, Personal experience, Polyamory, Puppy play, Relationship


Playing with other people in a sexual way has been a new experience. I’m a gigantic slut in my fantasies, but in reality I’ve only ever been with about as many people as I can count on one hand. For some reason, while I feel perfectly okay doing “crazy kinky shit” with people I’ve just met, like letting them beat me with whips, letting them tie me up in very strenuos positions with rope, shackles, handcuffs, and whatever else is lieing about, and more things, I feel far more self-conscious and uncomfortable with the thought of kissing, groping, or fucking people that I don’t know very well.

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.

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Wednesday, February 28, 2007

The psychology of conditioning in a D/s relationship

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Chastity/Orgasm denial, Puppy play, Sexual teasing and control, Training/Conditioning

I’ve been attending a ton more meetings lately. This is certainly due, in large part, to the lovely social explosion my life has recently experienced. It’s a ton of fun to get out of the house, feeling energized (that in itself a function of my work proving much less stressful these past few weeks), and being able to go out and listen to other people’s ideas of kink and BDSM play.

Today, I attended a presentation given by a graduate student on conditioning and, ultimately, behavior modification. It was extraordinarily academic (her handout had a bibliography!), which was both interesting and slightly disappointing. Part of me just wanted to hear about some more kinky ideas for play. However, I learned a lot, and will need to do a lot of googling later on to learn even more.

Not surprisingly, much of the example scenarios that the presenter did bring up involved orgasm control; it’s not just such an obviously kinky application of conditioning, but it’s also the application that has the greatest amount of research behind it. (Best quote of the day: “I’m still shocked at what you can get grant money for!”) There was a ton of valuable information in the presentation, but let me summarize what I found to be the salient learning points for my own reference.

Conditioning is the academic term for what people in the BDSM scene more often call “training.” This is an interesting point because I’ve often disliked the word training. It conjures up silly images of professional dominatrices (dominatrixes?) offering some form of “training” to clients who pay them to do so. The pro-domme, in that image, is the one I see as the trained, submissive partner. In fact, knowing many pro-dommes as friends (way more than I can count on two hands by now), I hold this belief strongly because many (though not all) of them are, by their own admission, submissives in their heart of hearts. To hear the two terms associated as two perspectives of the same coin has triggered a new way of relating to the term and by extension, the people who use the terminology.

The only context in which I used to feel comfortable thinking about “being trained” was that in puppy play scenes, and that never had anything to do with conditioning but with roleplay. What struck me, however, wasn’t the academic exaplanation but rather how the academic understanding of these concepts could lead to a far better understanding of how to apply such behavior modification and conditioning techniques to BDSM training scenarios in a truly D/s dynamic–one that is predicated on a real, strong, loving D/s relationship.

So what is conditioning? Conditioning is about creating a conditioned response to a neutral stimulus. This is not only academically fascinating, but is also at the root of all fetishes. In fact, sexual response is largely believed to be the result of two kinds of conditioning: classical conditioning and operant conditioning.

How does conditioning work? Most of us already know, but in a nutshell, classical conditioning works like this, using Pavlog’s dogs as an example:

  1. An unconditioned stimulus (food) produces an unconditioned response (salivating).

  2. A neutral stimulus (bell) is introduced along with the unconditioned stimulus (food), creating an association over time between the neutral stimulus and the unconditioned response (salivating).

  3. Eventually, the neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus (bell) which, by itself, causes a conditioned response (salivating).

Note how the response never changed. In Pavlov’s dogs example, it was always salivating. In kinky scenarious, it may be something else. For the sake of example and enjoyment, let’s do the same thing but with the not-so-hypothethical example of how I “learned” to love playful spanking:

  1. An unconditioned stimulus (singletail whippings, an often playful event for my play) produces an unconditioned response (masochistic enjoyment).

  2. A neutral stimulus (spanking) is introduced along with the unconditioned stimulus (singletail whippings), creating an association over time between the neutral stimulus and the unconditioned response (masochistic enjoyment).

  3. Eventually, the neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus (spanking) which, by itself, causes a conditioned response (masochistic enjoyment).

This can be applied to so many things and has so many uses in BDSM and kinky relationships that it’s really unending. The example above demonstrates how conditioning can be used to increase kink compatibility between partners. I used to hate getting my ass spanked. Now I rather enjoy it, and I even wiggle my butt to get it some attention when I’m feeling like playing.

However, there are some additional things that I learned tonight that were exceptionally helpful to realize. As it turns out, successfully conditioning someone is a lot more complex than simple pairing of stimulus as the classical conditioning example would have you believe. If other factors aren’t taken into account, it just won’t work. Some of these factors are well-researched, some are still unknown, and still others are emotional.

For instance, I learned tonight that there is a concept in this field of psychology called habituation. Habituation is the notion that boredom with a certain stimulus works against the conditioning response for sexual purposes. No one masturbates to the same porn or the exact same fantasy over and over again. Mixing it up keeps things hot. (This probably, and finally, explains my recent enjoyment of the various “games” I am wanting to play in the arena of orgasm control.) In other words, variety is not only the spice of life, it’s also an essential ingrediant in successful slave or puppy training, for example, or in any kind of conditioning.

Mixing it up a little requires the introduction of operant conditioning. In a nutshell, operant conditioning is a reward and punishments system; organisms want to increase pleasure and decrease suffering. The trick is knowing what is pleasureable and what is not. In other words, newsflash! Masochists do not consider pain as suffering.

Interestingly, several factors all combine to indicate that rewards are far more effective than punishments. In one simple example, once rewards are established, the removal of the reward is often a sufficient punishment in and of itself. Simple and effective. Rewards are all about positive reinforncement. Do well, and you’ll get a treat.

However, what happens if you tell a dog to sit, and each time it sits you give the dog the treat? It will sit, but it will expect the treat. If it doesn’t get it the next time you ask it to sit, what will happen? The dog will stand up. The conditioned response has gone because the reward was removed, and this is called extinction. In order to keep the dog obeying your commands you need to place it on a constant reinforcement schedule. This is, obviously, suboptimal for a D/s dynamic because it forces the dominant to constantly maintain the desired behavior in the submissive.

Much more powerful than a constant reinforcement schedule is an intermittent reinforcement schedule. In such a schedule, rather than getting a treat every time the dog sits, it only gets the treat sometimes. To further strengthen the reinforcement, the dog gets not one kind of treat, but any one of a set of many kinds of treats. This creates uncertainty in the submissive, and results in the trained behavior being maintained with much less effort and for much longer periods of time because the submissive doesn’t know when or what its reward will be, so it obeys at all times.

All of this reinforcement talk is reminiscent of Ms. Rika’s fantastic essay on Rewards vs. Treats. In fact, it’s mostly the same exact thing, only Ms. Rika seems to intuitively understand what I have only understood through intellectualizing the question. She states that positive reinforcement should be intermittent because it emphasizes the dominant’s control. Indeed, she is reffering to an intermittent reinforcement schedule used along with operant conditioning.

Now, finally, with a strong foundational understanding of how conditioning works, we can understand why the following tips and tricks are so effective:

  • Set small, realistic goals and reward these baby-steps when they are taken successfully frequently. Taking this approach to conditioning is typically more successful than setting large goals and providing one “large lump sum” reward at the end. Again, classical conditioning teaches us that it takes time to change behavior, and that it is easier to change behavior in small ways gradually than in large ways quickly.

  • Make sure you find rewards that work. What’s the best way to learn about these for your particular dynamic? Ask the submissive what s/he likes! Make a list of all these rewards and their percieved values and create an intermittent reward schedule to reinforce the desired behavior when it occurs. (As a sidenote, this means my girlfriend and I need to rethink our “consequence” box for accidental orgasms.)

  • Avoid confusing punishments with play. Again, a masochist does not see beatings as a punishment. Instead, removal of the rewards is often a far more effective punishment. It is also safer and prevents you from setting yourself up for failure.

  • Make sure you are aware of what behavior you want to encourage, and what you don’t. Be aware of your own behavior and the behavior of others such that you will be able to recognize the good behavior when it happens; it’s a lot easier to spot the problem behavior than the desired one.

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