Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

Friday, January 4, 2008

America’s Sexual Sampler Platter: Everything but Me is on the Menu

Category labels: BDSM in the media, Bitter and jealous, D/s dynamics, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Rant, Sexism

I get that New Years is a time of resolution, a time when people feel compelled by the time of year to make themselves better. The holidays are over, all that weight is back around your midsection, and there’s never been a better time to get back in shape, to stop that bad habit, to become better with women, to…on and on and on.

On the second of January I received an astonishingly fitting pair of postal letters. The first letter was the new catalogue of The Stockroom, one of the largest online sex toy retailers, and the second letter was from a local church that promised me blessings for using their special prayer rug. Dear readers, I kid you not! Of course, I promptly tossed the Jesus-decorated prayer rug in the trash, flipped through the Stockroom’s catalogue until I got bored seeing women tied up, and then gave it to Eileen, since she’s far more excited by that idea than I will ever be.

I suppose it should strike me as not at all odd that I’m seeing a disturbing influx of sexist, incendiary material fill every possible orifice of my news feeds. Most infuriating of all is that it’s not even that much more than usual, which is to say that the litany of aggravating material I’ll briefly discuss below is far more often the rule rather than the exception and that, itself, is the most depressing thing about them.

First, via The Sex Carnival, this Boinkology post links to SellYourSexTape.com with more cheerful humor than I could ever muster. It showcases with quite explicit flair exactly how marginalized a sexuality like mine is, as if there wasn’t enough of that already.

[…]if you want to make the big money ($2000, for the curious), you’ll have to document your sex life for an hour a day for an entire week, making sure to keep it interesting. Bonus points for shots of “daily life” and minimal shots of the boyfriend — this is straight porn, after all.

Oh, and kinksters need not apply: “Sex scenes should be natural and loving and happy, no violence, but don’t forget the money shots! Do not include anything illegal or “obscene”. ie. no interspecies, no golden showers, no forced sex, etc.”

Once again we have these time-honored, incredibly insulting assumptions about porn and sexuality. Men consume, women are the product. Anything that isn’t straight, hetero-normative sex is “unnatural,” or “obscene.” Rougher, more “violent” sex is okay so long as it’s the woman on the bottom, for “the money shot,” but if you can call it kinky then it’s immediately cut. No concern is ever paid to the woman’s sexual satisfaction, as long as we get to see the man ejaculating. Also, we don’t want to look at men because men aren’t sexy, they’re just facilitators; a man’s value is in his finances.

In an even more mainstream outlet, Tom found the kicker when he came across AskMen.com’s recent article called, of all things, How to Dominate and Dominant Woman. Augh! As Tom put it rather succinctly:

Because, you know, [women] all secretly want to be submissive. Not to mention that they will respect men who do this.

I could barely get through the introduction to this article without gritting my teeth:

We often associate dominant women with whips, chains and a pitiful man groveling at their feet while licking a pair of vinyl boots. This certainly occurs with some regularity, but you may be surprised to learn that dominance doesn’t always translate into sadism. On the contrary, many dominant women play the superior role in relationships simply because their man hasn’t learned how to dominate them. She may be strong-willed, feisty and independent, but this doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to be ravished like any other female might. If you’re ready to take charge in the bedroom, the following tips will show you precisely how to sexually dominate a dominant woman.

It’s precisely this kind of narrow-mindedness that keeps both men and women enslaved to gender ideals that make only a very small percentage of real men and women happy. In one fell swoop, this introduction alone manages to insult just about every possible orientation I can think of, including submissive men (by calling us “pitiful”), dominant women (by implying they should be playing an “inferior” role in a relationship), and dominant men (by stating rather explicitly that not dominating a dominant woman means they haven’t been ready to “take charge” yet). I think the only insult I’m not seeing is one aimed at submissive women—but that’s probably because they’re so inconsequential anyway that their influence doesn’t really matter in the first place.

(Elizabeth, please do an 87-part series on this. Please. PLEASE!)

From yet another corner of the blogosphere I was shown this “orgasmic experience simulator” that, while obviously someone’s idea of a joke, basically denigrates the male sexual experience as devoid of diverse value even though it seems to be making fun of the female orgasm at first glance. The simulator is a simple two buttons, one for experiencing orgasm as a male and another as a female. Click the male button and your browser window shakes just a smidgen and you’re presented with the following JavaScript alert box:

Total Time (including undressing, dressing and somking a cigarette): 58 seconds

Press the female button and you’re guided through numerous jump-through-the-hoops alert dialogues that ends in a climactic window-shaking experience. This is an example of the prevalence of the misguided belief that men are all the same, the same belief that has that disgusting AskMen.com article thinking the only submissive men are pitiful examples of masculinity.

But wait, there’s more!

Lolita found a video about which she asks “is it bondage porn, or an Agent Provocateur video?” Once again, all I see is blatantly misogynistic understandings of sex, with (once again) submissive women centerfolds. What’s striking about this instance is that it is so obviously an advertisement directed towards both men and women, yet it is still women on which the camera unapologetically focuses throughout the entire video. The message is, once again, crystal clear: it’s the female form and only the female form worth embracing for the singular purpose of abating the carnal desire of men.

Poor, hapless, helpless men, one might think! In both the vanilla world and the kink world men are treated very much the same: as victims of their own biology, always thinking with the wrong head. Control sex, it’s thought, and you control a man, because sex is worth more to men than anything else. How much more? Good question!

Thankfully, Eileen showed me this post of Bad Man’s that links to CostOfSex.com, which has a handy calculator to show us exactly how much time, effort, and money men spend each day on their high-priced hookers called girlfriends and wives. Oh, and hookers. Can’t forget the hookers. The takeaway from this link is that the message of men-as-monetary-value and women-as-sexual-value is so ingrained in men themselves, that they are taking a perverted sense of pride in their efforts to get the most sex for the least amount of money. That is, after all, exactly how men are taught to prove their manliness!

Lest you think that it’s only people like you and me who can see the sexism here, note that the CostOfSex.com calculator is courtesy of a site that calls itself Mr. Sexist. They sell T-Shirts. Want to know my favorite?

I’ve got an 8-inch thick wallet.

I do realize cultural and sexual progress doesn’t happen at the blindingly fast pace that we’re all used to technological advancements happening, but, seriously…if this is what 2008 has in store for me, I’m going to keep wishing I could hibernate until 3008 rolls around. Again, I do realize some of these are jokes—and yes, they’re kind of funny in that “I’m only half-joking” sort of way. What hurts me right now about all of these things is the insurmountable disparity of privilege in regards to sexual power—in what ways power is or is not okay to be shared or expressed—that results in the stigmatization or, worse, the invisibility of submissive men like me (and, for that matter, dominant women, too).

Will it really take ’til 3008 to stop hurting?

Comments (4)

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Men and masks in porn

Category labels: Bitter and jealous, Erotica and pornography, Kink events, Rant, Sexism

Here are some preliminary thoughts about something I see pretty often in pornography, especially BDSM (or kink-wanna-be) porn, that I don’t like. Men in such pornography, regardless of whether they are dominant or submissive, gay or straight (as if men’s sexuality is as binary as that), or most any other characteristic that I can think of, are often seen wearing masks, hoods, or other items intended to hide their identity and render them, mostly, anonymous. This is very frustrating for several reasons.

It is an obviously gendered inequality; that is to say it is downright sexist. Women, again regardless of their sexual orientation, role, or other characteristics, are never seen wearing such anonymizing devices unless the purpose of the pornography is to accentuate (presumably) consensual objectification (which I have no problem with and think is very sexy).
It tells men that our sexuality is expendable and replaceable. This is probably a bigger issue than I can do justice (due to a lack of education on the subject), but this is also showcased quite profoundly by the fact that men are universally paid less for their participation in pornography—if they are paid at all—than women are.
It tells men that we are unsightly. I’ve even seen gay porn in which the only actors are men who are all wearing masks. I mean, really, what the fuck? Do these pornographers think that gay people do not like seeing the faces of their sexual partners?
It makes ignorant or uninformed people believe that participating in sexual acts such as the ones portrayed is something to be ashamed of, so much so that even the actors fear for their identity.
It makes for worse porn.

First of all, I am not talking about the kind of sex that happily incorporates hoods and masks into the sexual act. I am instead talking about the kind of porn that uses hoods and masks specifically for purposes so obviously not related to the sex I’m watching that their mere presence becomes distracting in the best case and downright insulting in the worse. Frankly, I am insulted by the insinuation that the only valid part of a man’s body worthy of being filmed is his penis. It’s simply untrue and unfair.

It is absurd to watch Men in Pain clips in which the naked guy is being interviewed about his experience while he is wearing nothing but a locking leather hood. It is similarly absurd to see clips or pictures of bound women being fingered by men who walk in and out of the frame, fully clothed and masked, in an obvious attempt to be as stealthy as possible.

The standard disclaimer from the pornographers is this: most people who buy our porn are men, so we want to make it as easy as possible for men to feel like they can imagine themselves as the man in the video/picture/whatever. First of all, completely sidestepping the circular point that most porn is made for men and that’s obviously why most of the pornographer’s customers are men (it really isn’t rocket science), they need to understand that as a submissive guy, which is indeed part of their claimed target audience, the person I see myself replacing is the submissive. If the submissive is faceless because he is hidden by a hood when he shouldn’t be, then I lose a big chunk of information about how that submissive is feeling and thus the porn becomes less valuable to me.

In other words, I would prefer to wank to pictures of men being tortured than pictures of women torturing men. This is why I tend to enjoy femsub porn more than most malesub porn out there. At least in those instances I can actually get the emotional content from the submissive’s point of view and vicariously feel that. Porn that hides the submissive man behind a hood is taking the hottest part of the picture, the bottom, out of focus.

In every instance of viewing the hooded or masked man the message is the same: the man is just “some guy.” He could have been replaced by anybody, and the effect would be identical. All the value to the product is brought by the women. And in gay porn where everyone’s wearing masks? Again, what are they thinking the value is in that if it’s not some sort of plot device?

There is a paradox here. The women are at once more valuable and less protected than the men. Think about it. Why else would someone want to hide their identity while doing porn? Duh, it’s not okay to do porn. Doing it is wrong, something to ashamed of, something you need to hide for fear of being outed, as sex worker, a pervert, or maybe something even worse. Yet only the men are hiding. Does the fact that they are mean they are so much more fragile than the women? Please.

What is most personally disturbing to me is the instance when submissive men are involved in some porn scene and yet the porn scene is so obviously not about submissive men that one would think submissive men was not actually a sexuality.

The most striking recent example of this occurred the other weekend at Black Rose XX, where in the Oasis Room a table full of fetish photography postcards was laid out. Out of the more than 20 available photographs, a grand total of 2 showed submissive men at all. One image showed a woman looking over her shoulder (dressed in formal fetish fatigues, you know the kind) and in the background, literally about 2 centimeters high, was a small image of a submissive man—hooded, of course—doing absolutely nothing interesting. The second postcard was a close-up picture of a torso in a waist-cincher, extremely shapely and made-up, whose only hint of maleness was the few pixels of clear testicle peeking out between the legs.

The experience of seeing those postcards was saved a little when Eileen and I overheard two women looking at them muttering to themselves, “It’s all female submissives.”

“Didn’t you know?” Eileen sarcastically jabbed at them, “Men aren’t pretty enough to photograph.”

This sent one of the women on a very welcomed, short rant about that fact, paraphrased below.

[The photographer] told me he doesn’t photograph men because those pictures wouldn’t sell. Hah! I laughed at him, and told him I’d have bought pictures of men and how could he possibly think there wasn’t a market for such work? Just look around us! Most of the women here have come to this event with their men, dominant or otherwise. I mean, one picture, he can’t do one picture where maleness is the focus?

Of course, people know that women aren’t “the real market” for images of men, because only other men are, right? This woman clearly didn’t seem to think so. Neither does this more famous one.

More to the point, though I hate to admit at times because it lets people too easily lump me into that category of men-who-would-buy-porn-of-men, I would like to see porn of submissive men where submissive men are actually the focus of the porn because then I could actually believe that I’m not the only man in the world who wants to do those sorts of things. Why else do you think people look at porn? It’s because they are using it as an instructive example of figuring out their sexual likes and dislikes. I look at porn to go, “Holy fuck, that looks awesome, I want to have the things that that girl is having done to her done to me!”

I’ve gotten really good pretending all the tied up women in porn are really tied up men, but it still angers me that I have to do it. It is endlessly frustrating to see an endless stream of so much very good pornography, excellent bondage, extremely hot fantasies-come-true only for the women who bottom. There is precious little good male bondage, and even then, there’s no sex. This is why so much of my personal porn collection that has anything to do with men getting fucked is drawn art.

Comments (8)

Thursday, November 15, 2007

The closet and the importance of others

Category labels: Beginner BDSM, Community, Personal experience, Rant, Vanilla life

The mini-renfaire up at the Cloisters this past Summer was an interesting event this year. Interesting not because of the event itself, but because of the sheer number of people Eileen and I ran into—spontaneously—who we know from elsewhere. Obviously, crossover between the kink scene and various other niche subcultures (i.e., renfaires) is huge.

Even more interesting than this elementary observation was the observation that Eileen made afterwards. “We keep running into people we know,” she said, “and having nothing much to say to them.”

“Does that surprise you?” I asked, completely acclimated to this phenomemon myself but noting the slightly higher-than-usual pitch of her remark.

Indeed, what more do we really have to say to one another than “Hello, how are you?” These are not good friends we have. I like them all well enough, but aside from our mutual interest in kink and (apparently) renfaires, there is little we have in common—none of them were even of the same orientation as we are (male submissives and female dominants, orientations with an ever-apparent dearth of participants). I’m reminded of something Richard said to me a while ago, which is that a shared experience does not make good friendship all by itself.

Nevertheless, there’s something undeniably important about being able to say hello to these people in the first place; it’s not their friendship that’s necessarily beneficial, it’s the fact that they make up a portion of the visible kink community.

A visible kinky community—even one that does not include certain elements that I wish it did—is extremely important. A visible kinky community is the other side of the closet. Without one, you couldn’t be out of the closet even if you wanted to.

When Eileen and I were first looking for new places to live (outside of New York City), we both quickly agreed on a list of prerequisites. At the top of this list was the requirement that whereever we end up, there be a kink community of some kind large enough so as not to be constantly underground.

On a large scale, visible communities that we can join and participate in are a factor in choosing where we want to live. On a smaller scale, however, these communities are also important as vehicles of self-expression. They provide places we can go, people we can talk to, things we can do.

This is why I have often bemoaned the fact that in my day-to-day (non-cyber) life I have no friends who consider themselves primarily submissive or bottom men, as I do. (Again, I have acquaintances, but these are not friends.) In my little social community, I am still something of an oddity, and not just in that “everyone is special and unique” way. Even worse, the typical submissive man, which I do not consider myself and whom I meet anew with alarming frequency, is the epitome of the kind of person I, and most others I know, don’t want to spend time with.

This means that whenever other people learn that I am a submissive man before they know much else about me, I hope against hope they don’t lose interest right then and there, and I’m surprised if they don’t. After all, I probably would turn away if I were them.

On the other hand, in the tiny little world I’ve managed to carve out for myself with the help of some friends, I may still be an oddity but at least I’m not sneered at, or looked upon with quizzical incomprehension as would surely be the case somewhere with no awareness of this kind of kinky sexuality. Of course, even in such a place as New York City, the USA’s East Coast BDSM Mecca, there are still uncomfortable expectations whenever I leave the safe haven of my circle of friends. When Eileen and I go out to the club, she gets the same kinds of alienating looks when she wears her jeans and T-shirt while she beats me up that I get when I wear my flared girl’s jeans and cap-sleeve shirts on the streets outside.

I know that disapproving look we sometimes get will always be there, somewhere. The nature of things is such that I can’t expect it to go away, nor do I really want it to disappear forever; that look tells me that someone out there does things differently, and that’s fine by me. (Generalizing a bit, take a peek at Kink in Exile’s short piece, The Power of “No Means No”, for another application of this same concept.) But now that I have plans to leave New York City, will I end up in a place where the only place I don’t see that look is my own home?

At that point I might as well get back in the closet about being a submissive bi guy. That’s why a visible community, other people and welcoming spaces, is so important to me.

Comments (5)

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Stupid, stupid gay tops are just as bad as other men and women

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Emotions, Personal history, Rant, Stupid dominants

I realize this is very old news but I wanted to share this little gem of a message I receieved the other day on the piss-poor web site ALT.com. For fairness (and because it’s funnier that way), I’ll quote the thing in full without breaks:

Master has attached a copy of his profile.
It may be a little long but if you read it you will understand Master better. Read what Master has to offer and wants.
There are a few question in the profile for you to answer.
Reply show respect.

—— Profile Attached ——-

Master owns His bussiness and hom.
Free of all STD’s and drugs; as slave must be!
Sane and safe.

Over five years Experience as a true MASTER.

Slave should be 18 to 38; slave should be in good shape and health.

If slave is free of all STD’s not just HIV, AIDS but herpes and all STD’s then MASTER willing to talk with and plan on relocating; live in, room and board.

Master looking for a slave to care for all slave’s needs.

********************READ FUTHER**************************

> Master is free of all STD’ as slave must be.
> ARE YOU FREE OF ALL STD’s?
> Master will give his slave room and board.
> Master wants a Master slave relationship and more.
> Master has been train to be a Master over eight years.
> Master has been an active Master for five years.
> Master’s last slave need to tend to his mother.
> Master want a slave who knows it’s place.
> Master know what He wants from his slave.
> Master is safe and sane. Owns his home and businesses.
> Master need to know if slave has any medical needs.
> Master want to know if slave has food slave can not eat.
> Master can help relocate if we get to that point.
> Limits respected

Slave’s reply will show respect.

Okay, I could rip into this forever. Respect? No, that’s not something you’re going to get.

For instance, it’s clear to me this person is suffering from some kind of disassociative state since he only seems capable of referring to himself in the third person. Maybe he’s spent so much time looking at himself in a mirror he forgot he’s not actually two people. I actually have additional evidence to support this hypothesis; along with this articulate writing sample came a cropped photo of a naked man’s body obscured only slightly by the camera’s own flash. I can thus also deduce that this person doesn’t know how to use the timer feature on a digital camera. I’m frankly impressed he can use a keyboard seeing as how he can’t even keep his facts about himself straight. (Five years ‘experience’? Eight years? Oh fuck it all, why not fifteen years?)

However much fun the ripping into is, this message does actually illustrate what’s been said dozens of times before, but is interesting because it’s an example of a gay man doing it. I don’t think that’s something a lot of people realize happens, or if they do realize it happens, don’t realize just how similarly pathetic and stupid it is as all the straight women (and straight men!) who do similar things. It’s at least illuminating to see the cold, hard copy-and-pasted evidence that this shit goes on regardless of sexual orientation.

A variant on the above example is also the reason why I’ve never been able to find myself that interested in the gay leather community, rife with its protocols and traditions. Whereas this man is simply pathetic and arrogant (a dangerous combination if you ask me), the gay leather scene that I’ve encountered is rigid and formalized, with a much more unyielding cultural structure, an expected path. This is especially true for younger men.

It is identical, in my mind, to the completely head-in-ass thought process that leads “normal” people to think that school, then college, then a job, then marriage, then kids, and then a house is going to bring them happiness and fulfillment regardless of personal feelings. In the gay leather scene, this path is often being a bottom, usually some daddy’s boy, getting trained or “molded,” thereby learning to serve, then eventually growing up and becoming a daddy by one’s self. (Yes, I do realize this is a narrow view of the gay leather scene, but I’m not talking about the scene at large. I’m talking about the one I’ve experienced directly.)

In all of these things are expectations; expectations like these make me angry. Jaw-clenchingly, fist-poundingly, I-want-you-to-try-to-hit-me-as-hard-as-you-can angry. They do not make me feel submissive. Anger, I think, completely destroys submission because submission, by its very nature in a relationship context, is voluntary.

I get angry whenever I feel as though I’m being saddled with expectations that I interpret as matching any of these very touchy chords—touchy because I’ve always had long-standing battles with authority figures since I was 6 or so. It’s not only a kink thing. I still don’t speak to my mother very often because our relationship has been on rocky footing since she all but forced me to attend a religious school I despised. I’ve seen her once in maybe the last half year, and she lives not three blocks away from me. (Perhaps this is a shame; there are things about her, like her staunch persistence, that I admire.)

But tell me to do something without apparent reciprocal gain or respect, expect it of me, and you’ll only strengthen my resolve to fight back or give me impetus to “rebel.” (What an immature word; damn useless thesaurus.)

This is not actually at odds with my sexually submissive tendencies at all, by the way. My sexually submissive tendencies are self-serving, self-centered, and selfish, as are yours, and they’re healthy that way.

Also, in case someone’s thinking it (because I know someone is), non-consensual fantasies and fetishes are not a waiver of liability to disregard a partner or place your own expectations on them. So fuck non-con bull shit. I love non-con stuff, but if you think that submission or even so-called “slavery” (and certainly that crap about 24/7 “Total Power Exchange” in whatever form it shows up) is non-voluntary then you’re headed towards a disaster. Voluntary means free of coercion, duress, or undue inducement, which is not the same thing as consent (which merely means, in English, to say okay).

Comments (9)

Friday, August 17, 2007

What every big sexuality community web site does wrong

Category labels: BDSM in the media, Community, Rant, Technology, Vanilla life

It’s time for a brief interlude during all my ranting on porn. Let’s get back to some of this practical stuff.

This time, because I can, I want to talk about what every big sexuality community web site does wrong and what they can do to fix it. Because, frankly, alternative sexuality organization web sites suck my big fat web developer’s dick. (There is plenty, though not an overwhelming amount, of geek-speak ahead. If you want to flame me about that, don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Before I rip into these web sites though, let me first acknowledge the incredible hard work that I’m sure mountains of volunteers must put into these things. No one is making money off these sites and, as such, it’s understandably a lot harder to spend the time doing things well. The fact that this stuff is even up online in the first place is really a credit to a lot of people’s passions and commitment. Three cheers for all of you! (Seriously.)

Okay, now that you know all of this is just a good-natured jab to try and make things better, let’s get into the meaty parts where I totally rip your web site to shreds and tell you how badly you’re stuck in the last century.

In the true style of proper web copy (more), here is my conclusion first:

Most BDSM organizations’ web sites utterly fail in their mission to attract people to their events because they are intimidating, hard to use, and decidedly uninformative.

And, the natural fix for this problem:

Make BDSM organization web sites friendlier, easier to navigate, and immediately useful.

You can stop reading now if you don’t actually care about this stuff, but if you do, are at all curious, or—and especially—if you manage one of the web sites I’m talking about, please keep reading. You’ll thank me when you’re done.

The Design Problem or Don’t Scare Away the Newbies, you idiots!

TES’s web site serves as a wonderful example of this first point, that BDSM organization web sites are stupidly intimidating. Why? Here’s why: when the average kink-curious person is searching for BDSM web sites and they see TES’s sad design, here’s what they’re thinking:

It’s an inverted white-on-dark design so clearly what they are doing must not be normal or okay. (This person is already probably surfing the TES site under the cloak of darkness in their computer room hoping their spouse or their parents won’t walk in on them. Why are you making it seem like that’s the normal way to get information about kinky sex from you?)

It uses lots of colors intended to signify scary things, like deep red and lots of black and mettalic colors, so they must be really dangerous people. (Do you know how much courage it has taken this person to even consider going to a kink event? Why are you making them feel like their fear is justifiable?)

They have really tiny text for things I’m interested in (like all the main event descriptions) and really big text and graphics for the things I’m not (like their own logo and big welcome banners), so maybe they’re not actually the group for me. (Don’t you get that this person has come to your web site for information about how to be kinky in their own lives? Don’t focus on the welcome message, which nobody cares about, focus on the reason they’re coming to your site in the first place!)

This is classicly fucked-up design and is unfortunately all too common. The net result is that these types of designs make people feel anxious and afraid and turn site visitors away from the rest of your content pages. Don’t do that.

Contrast this general design sense with, for example, the Polyamorous-NYC web site. While it has other problems, design is not one of them (for the most part).

Whereas TES has lots of light-on-black, some horrendous yellow color, and lots of big red headlines and a logo that looks like the blade to a guillotuine, Poly NYC has several pinks, a neutral beige, some blues, and white along with a picture of three people smiling and holding hands on the home page.

Which site feels more welcoming to you? If you were a hot and sexy 18-year-old looking to explore alternative sexualities, which group would you feel safer checking out first, based solely on the web site’s design?

I think BDSM people really like to brag about how incredibly intense and perverse they are. After all, we kink hard on danger but this is no excuse for confusing your fantasy with your real-life goals, you morons, so stop that shit right the fuck now, okay?

In fairness, TES is not the only group that suffers from this design problem. Dom Sub Friends, the Lesbian Sex Mafia, and to a lesser extent Gay Male S/M Activists do as well. But TES is by far the worst. Sex stores have the same problem. Contrast something like Purple Passion’s web site with, for instance JT’s Stockroom. The difference is night and day, literally.

The Usability Problem or Stop Making It So Hard To Browse Your Site, asshat!

This is big, so let’s start somewhere that’s got a big database. DSF is often cited as having a great database of links. But in reality, it’s not great, it’s just massive.

Granted, massive can be a facet of usefulness. After all, eBay is fucking massive. You can find just about anything you can kink with on eBay. (Or Amazon, by the way.) However, the distinguishing factor between eBay’s database and DSF’s database is findability, not size.

To an untrained eye (by which I mean, evidently, by DSF’s web site administrator’s eyes), findability just means “use a search engine.” (DSF doesn’t use a search engine on all their resources pages, just some of them, by the way.) This, unfortunately, is totally missing the boat.

Why you need to think about what you’re doing or Obviously you’re too busy jacking off at the computer

First of all, how do you think search engines work? They work by analyzing structured data to produce information that is ultimately relevant to the user’s needs. Do you think all that data just structured itself? No, someone had to structure it, someone had to think about how to present it, and someone had to think about how to do all of that in a way that meets the user’s goals.

Taking this out of the theoretical and back to the practical, let’s take a closer look at DSF’s resource pages. First thing you notice is that they have a “BDSM Resources” page on which there is an incredibly strange, unnatural distinction between “Organizations and Forums” and the rest of their “BDSM Resources”. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t you consider organizations and forums to be BDSM resources on a BDSM resource page? Why the separation? What’s the point?

It’s pretty common knowledge that only the most persistent users will click through a web site to find what they’re looking for. Most users will click on one or two links and if they haven’t found what they’re looking for, they’ll go back to their search engine of choice and try all over again. Then lather, rinse, repeat. As a web developer, every decision you make impacts your users, so you damn well have a good reason for doing something. If you don’t, you’re doing it wrong.

Of course, this problem is much easier to tackle when the volume of information you have isn’t as large. Look at NYBOL’s web site to see the complete opposite spectrum of the very same poor architectural problems. What is that? An entry for the “let’s see who can make an entire web site on a single web page” contest? They don’t even have a lot of information and they have given absolutely no thought to how their content should be structured.

There are two primary navigational modes users are accustomed to on the web. These are search and browse. Listen closely because I’m only going to say this a hundred billion times: users search when they are answering a question or trying to solve a problem. Users browse in order to learn about a problem or to gather information. When you think about how to structure the content on your web site, you need to think about how users will interact with this content in those two modes of navigation.

As an example of a web site that does this relatively well (and which took me a grand total of maybe three or four hours to implement, literally), take a look at the way Conversio Virium organizes its content.

Main navigational tabs provide hierarchical structure to the content of the web site. The constitution is in the about CV section, the presenter guidelines are in the meetings and events section, and information about specific leadership positions are in the membership section. Makes sense, right? (Admittedly, it’s not always so clear moving forwad, but hindsight is always 20/20.)

The single search bar in a prominent position at the top of every page searches all the content on the site. (Being objective, I will also note that the serch results page for CV does need a lot of work. I did only put about three hours into the implementation of this site, you recall.)

Content is organized according to strict guidelines using categories and an events calendar, allowing faceted navigation so that users can either search or browse the site and end up at the same content by following a variety of paths.

Finally, the content itself cross-links to other relevant contents. Posts link to other posts. Events link to previous posts. News items link to events. Static pages link to each other. The more links you have, the easier it is to find what you’re looking for.

These days, this sort of thing is actually pretty easy to do at least decently well. Simply knowing how to make good use of a content management system helps a lot. TES uses Mambo, but they failed to provide the kind of faceted navigation of their site that CV provides for their’s, and so their CMS isn’t as useful to them.

I could get all technical here and start talking about why these sites should be getting rid of their URL cruft, why they are browser-hostile (fucking overuse of frames and JavaScript), and a dozen other topics, but you’d all be bored and obviously no one is reading this anyway. So, hoping that we’ve got this point down, I’ll just move on.

Make Yourself Useful or Stop Trying to Top Your Users, you freakin’ sex addicts!

If all of that isn’t enough already, let’s talk about one last point. (I promise this’ll be the last point I make and that you can all go back to jacking off at your own brilliance soon, as I too will do.) Usefulness. This is the most important point out of all three of my points today, so if you’re scanning this post and want to read just one point, I hope it’s this one.

You need to make your web site useful, or no one will use it. Well, duh, but what does that entail? Here’s the process, broken down into really simple steps:

Find out what your members want to do.

Make it possible for them to do that thing they want using a web site.

I swear, that’s all there is to it. Let me give you some examples.

The BDSM calendar that no one uses

Almost every single site I linked to above has some form of events calendar. TES and DSF both have so-called “dynamic” calendars. GMSMA, LSM, and Poly-NYC, among others, have so-called “static” calendars, which are really nothing more than unchanging pages that have some information about their next event. The problem with all of these calendars is that they are either totally useless or not-as-useful as they could be for the following reasons:

You can only view them on the page they’re published on. If I am interested in DSF meetings and GMSMA meetings, then I have to make my own page or my own calendar that combines both of these group’s information.

You can’t safely link directly to events because the location they are published on eventually changes (such as when being archived). If I want to link to an LSM event, I can’t, because the event itself isn’t a permanent fixture anywhere. Instead, I have to link to their events page and hope that my site users find the event on the page, if it’s still there.

Moving data out of this calendar into any kind of actually useful form is nearly impossible. Copy-and-paste is a waste of everyone’s time (computers were invented in order to obviate the need for humans to perform repetitive tasks).

The group with the absolute worst calendar scheme has to be OneTaste NY (and why is a fucking MySpace profile the thing that comes up on Google when I search for that phrase, by the way?), which—despite having a relatively decent calendar on their web site, actually—chooses to email me a massive hunk of HTML vomit every few weeks with their entire calendar for the month stuffed into it. Yuck! Why don’t you promote your web site calendar instead and offer an iCalander subscription feed or something like what CV does? You have the technology! You can rebuild it!

The only people who use these calendars are either devoted members of the club already, in which case you could probably force them to jump through rings of fire and they’d still do it just to get a look at the calendar, or are the people creating the calendar, in which case why do you even need a calendar since you already know what’s going on when? Answer: you don’t. You just suck at web development, is all.

(As an aside, there are a number of email-only subscription newsletters dealing with alternative lifestlye events. These aren’t really web sites so I didn’t say anything about them, but a word to the wise: please stop writing out these emails as though they are really long love letters. If you’re going to put out a newsletter in plain text as an event listing, for god’s sake, use some kind of convention to indicate the thing is actually a list, okay?)

A final note: all your print calendars need to have your web site’s calendar address on them, and you do actually have to change your web site calendar once in a while to keep it up to date. What’s the point of a calendar with the wrong information on it? Sheesh.

Anyway, moving on….

Other Web Sites Are Your Friends or The point of a link is to link you to something, dimwit!

The mentality of “stay at my site longer” is sooooo 1995. I’m serious, there’s nothing you can do to prevent web site users from going to another web site. Just give up the whole idea that your one site will ever be the be-all and end-all of information about any topic in the world right now, because if you don’t you’ll never be able to make a good web site for as long as you live.

Instead, actively embrace the idea that the more outbound links you have that go to good places the better your site will be. Why is this so? Because users like being linked to good, interesting information. They appreciate a useful service, whether that be in event information, educational material, or whatever else you can offer them. The way to do this is with links. So for fuck’s sake, link liberally!

In the BDSM community world, this means you need to link to other group’s web sites! Why is it that the only community web site I know about that links to other organizations on every page is Conversio Virium? (May, you made the CV web site. Oh, right, thanks. I forgot.) Seriously, why the fuck does TES not link to DSF? Or to LSM? Or to GMSMA? Or to MaST? Why does GMSMA not link back to TES?

Why are all you arrogant fucktards so concerned with recruiting members instead of actually being the useful, educational, supportive organization you so proudly claim to be? None of you are actually doing what you so nobly claim to do, and it’s about time you got off your high horses and started actually doing it. And you know what, the best tool you have to do that with is your web site. So come on, GET ON IT!

And by golly, I didn’t even get into the really fun bits like implementation and search engine optimizations. I mean, seriously, why is CV’s site the number one hit on Google right now for the search query “floating world bdsm”? That should be embarassing.

That was the end, but here is an outtake for humor’s sake

Let’s start with none other than The Eulenspiegel Society, the self-proclaimed oldest and largest BDSM education and support organization in the United States. Smack-dab on the top of the home page, TES proclaims their web site to be, and I quote, the official TES® web site. As if there are hordes of unofficial TES web sites out there on the Internet. They even italicize the word “official” to make it stand out more, to remind us that we are actually at the center of the BDSM universe. Please, get over yourselves, TES web site committee members. Neither you nor your organization (and especially not your web site) is that impressive.

While we’re on the topic of italicizing things, by the way, take a look at how they’ve italicized it. Do you know what this code is called?

<P ALIGN=Center> <FONT SIZE=+3>Welcome to the <I>Official </I>TES</FONT><FONT size="6"><B><SUP>®</SUP></B></FONT><FONT SIZE=+3>         Web Site.</FONT>

No? It’s called HTML vomit, that’s what it’s called. font elements have been deprecated since HTML 4.01, which became a W3C recommendation on the 24^th of December, in 1999. Did you hear that? Nineteen-ninety-fucking-nine. What the hell are font tags still doing on your home page? Has it not been updated since 1999?

To be fair, this exact problem plagues pretty much every web site built by people who don’t actually know how to work with the Web, which includes the vast majority of every so-called self-proclaimed “web designer” out there, which is also, coincidentally, apparently pretty much every tech-savvy kinky person in existence.

Morale of the story? Get someone who knows what they’re doing. And yes, they will either be very generous or they will charge you through the nose—and yes, you’re gonna like it.

Comments (31)

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

More men need to cry on the big porn screen

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM psychology, Bitter and jealous, Community, D/s dynamics, Erotica and pornography, Exhibitionism, Femdom, Politics of sex, Professional BDSM, Rant, Sex, Stupid submissives

The other day during dinner while hanging out with friends, of course, pornography gets brought up. (I’m sure the waitresses love us. Or hate us. Or love to hate us. (That’s called foreshadowing, by the way. (And this is called Lisp.)))

Now, porn gets brought up all the time in conversations with my general social circle. This might be because some of them are sex workers, others are sex bloggers, and still others are BDSM equipment vendors, the latter of whom don’t blog much. But unlike the usual discussion, this time I observed a much more interesting exchange about porn. I thought I’d share it with you.

The professor (who has made guest appearances elsewhere) started talking about this one porn web site in particular that’s selling a very humiliation-specific brand of hardcore sex. It’s all about degrading women while fucking them. It’s unfortunate that I’ll never be able to do his description justice because smiles that wide just can’t be communicated through words.

Suffice it to say, however, that all the women start out with delicately applied make up and by the end of the video the tears spilling from their eyes have turned their faces tie-dye colored, their throats are horse as they shout through ragged gasps about how dirty they are, and the guys are demanding they open up and get ready for another dick.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the bigger the shock value, the bigger the payday. (Lack of link because, come on. Tons of porn sites do this, not just this one. Do you really need a link?)

To my knowledge, I don’t think this has anything explicitly related to so-called formal BDSM (you know, whips and chains and stuff, the “serious” stuff) but come on, you can’t deny that’s fucking kinky sex.

Now, here’s the interesting part that came from the conversation. After the table was left momentarily silenced from the description of such (hopefully consensual and totally hot) humiliating sexual abuse, Eileen said, See, I’d have no problem with any of that at all if there were sites where I could see women doing that to men.

“Well, there’s like, Men In Pain—”, our professor friend started to say.

“Ohhhh no,” Eileen and I both started simultaneously. “Men In Pain is largely about excruciatingly typical pro-domme talk. Oh, and handjobs. Lots, and lots of handjobs.”

Are we wrong? Is there porn out there that objectifies men in an equivalent fashion to the way the industry of objectification of women (and very much including dominant women, by the way) called mainstream pornography is doing? I’ll admit to not actually having a subscription to Men In Pain. (I’ve never paid for porn in my life, unless you count buying Eileen dinner and hoping she’ll tie me to a spreader bar and stuff large things in my butt and then beat on me for it but I don’t think that’s comparable.) However, the massive amount of free video clips (soo NSFW) that Kink, Inc. puts out does not inspire hope.

So, fuck, where’s that porn video, the ones where the guys are sobbing? I’d be in it. Over the years, friends and acquaintances have offered me varying spots in varying kinds of porn shoots, but I always decline because they expect me to respond as though being asked to be in a porn production where I don’t get paid for my time is some kind of favor they’re bestowing upon me. As if, oh my god, now they like me, they really, truly like me!

What the fuck is up with that, also, by the way? First of all, it actually is a lot less sexy for me if I don’t get paid to do it, and second of all, why are my only two options for porn shoots always “stand right here and let me kick you in the balls while I look pretty” or “you’ll be blindfolded and he’ll go down on you ’til you pop”? If there’s one thing Men In Pain actually gets right (maybe there’s more than just one thing, but anyway) it’s their fucking variety. Or variety of fucking. (I even submitted a modeling application to them, for many reasons, but to no avail.) Anyway, you get my point.

I’m sure this post is going to confuse a lot of people. Maymay, they’ll say, how the fuck can you be so pro-porn and so anti-prodomme. Pro-dommes are just sex workers after all, you know. They’re part of the same industry. Why not get all huff-and-puff-and-blow-your-house-down about that porn site that your friend was talking about that you think objectifies women?

Because my problem with all of this isn’t the existence of the sex industry; it’s the monopoly (and the resulting monotony) of the sex industry that I think causes problems. In other words, it’s not just that I have a problem with pro-domme’s being the representation of female domination out in the world (a la Mistress Asscrusher), I also have problems with all the other shame-ridden stereotypes of every other gender and orientation combination. A lack of visible variety breeds a closeted, guilt-ridden culture. That is not okay.

Like Eileen said, where are the porn sites showing me some other kind of sex?

There was a wonderfully timely string of comments that started with britspin made on Bitchy’s blog earlier today just as I was trying to come up with the genius conclusion to this post. It’s so perfect, in fact, that I’m just going to quote some of what he says:

OK. Confession time. I’m one of those guys who enables this crap.

[…]

When it comes to a woman who even hints that she might be dominant, I go completely doolally. Self respect gets checked at the door, along with judgement, the awareness of possible mental health issues and anything that comes between me and the possibility of a woman doing rude, rude things.

This is even worse with people like me whose starting point with Femdom is the internet and our own fantasies- I get to measure my behaviour by strange chatroom etiquette, incredibly varied demands in alt.com profiles and a few videos made by english mansion and men in pain.

I suspect that basing my flirtation with dominant women on these reference points is not a recipe for successful social intereaction… but christ, I’m an ignoramous mostly hoping not to make an utter fool of myself… so I plead ignorance, not malignity!

Just as I’ve said countless times before. And then, just to drive the point home:

When you realise you’re sub or Dom, what reference points do you get? For me it was the avengers and a very weird fantasy about being kidnapped and kept in an emptied swimming pool by about twenty avenger clad women. I don’t think I ever got any options showing dominant women without PVC and leather.

[…]

I think with me it was very much… Gosh, I really want this badwrongthing done to me. Hmmm who seems to get away with doing badwrongthings. evil, pvc clad, fur wearing, faun torturing, whip wielding bond villanesses. Well in that casen that’s who I fancy… because they do the badwrongthings….

Did it really need this much elaboration? Where do you start railing against this stuff? Mainstream pornographers? Pro-dommes? Submissive men? Gender supremacists? Fucking abstinence-only sex educators? I’ll tell you where: every-fucking-where you see it. Yeah, that’s where you start.

Comments (11)

Saturday, August 4, 2007

What sexuality might taste like if you were a submissive man in 2007

Category labels: BDSM in the media, Bitter and jealous, Community, Emotions, Femdom, Myths and misconceptions, Personal experience, Rant, Stupid submissives

I’ve been really, really pissed off the last couple of ~~days weeks months~~ years. I thought it was getting better and I was beginning to get out of my bitter and jealous funk, but it’s just not happening. Might even be getting worse; instead of ranting on my own blog, now I’m ranting in the comments on Elizabeth’s blog (sorry about that, by the way). Pretty sad, really.

I had a long converastion with Lady Lubyanka today, whom I am almost certain thinks I am a very angry and very smart troubled young boy. (She would not be entirely incorrect either; but I did have to look up the word erudite when she called me that today. She’s such a sweet charmer.) Then, later, instead of spending dinner with friends I became too upset to be social and wanted to leave early, and this ended up as a very long conversation with Eileen about what was wrong.

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

Even though there’s no help in this post, I ultimately thought that writing about how to make things better without also showing the hurt may not actually be that effective. So here is the bitter taste of reality submissive men drink day in and day out:

I wanted to write about the incredibly aggravating notion that regardless of orientation, dominant or submisive, men are expected to be the pursuers while women, dominant or submissive, are expected to be the pursued.

I wanted to write about why many submissive men are just as responsible for debasing their own sexuality as the many pro- (and so obviously not-so-pro-)dommes who take delight in squashing them down while lifting them of that burdensome weight in their wallets. (”Thank you for stealing my money, Mistress, would you like another dollar?”)

I wanted to write about the lack of empathy so prevalent in the public BDSM scenes where more often than you’d probably think (more times than I can count and over the course of two relationships) people of all sexes befriend you if you’re a guy for the purposes of getting closer to your girlfriends, both significant other(s) and otherwise. After all, you’re a guy: you’re just a dime a dozen anyway and another twenty like you will walk through the door in the next two minutes. But oh my god, is that a breast standing next to you? Is there a photographer in the house? Someone must capture this moment and make it last a lifetime! (I still remember the near stampede bee line that was made towards my then-girlfriend when we came out to our first public BDSM meeting. It’s happened lots of times since then, too; mostly I’m just used to it now.)

I wanted to write about how most people assume that if you’re a guy you’re probably controlled by nothing more than that little blood-shot rod of tissue called a penis, and how incredibly shameful I feel to be male because so many times these people are actually correct in their accusations of men. (See above. ‘Nuff said.)

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

I wanted to write about how if you’re a submissive guy you’re treated with near-fear if not written off if you don’t call youself worthless or think you’re only value comes from how much money you make. My god, he’s submissive but he likes himself. He’s gotta be like the unabomber or one of those kids from Columbine—he’s clearly fucked up in the head. No self-respecting male would actually be submissive. I mean, he’s submissive? Doesn’t he not want to be respected? (Yeah, keep talking Einstein.)

If you are a man and you have had any experience at all interacting with almost any sexually oriented community (including non-kinky contexts), maybe you’re pretty pissed off, too. Worst of all, maybe a lot of people are telling you that you don’t have a lot of reason to be upset. After all, you’re a man, and the world handed you an easier time of things than, say, if you were a woman or if you were living in a third-world country. Shut up and be grateful, you selfish little prick.

I’m not ungrateful, you should tell them, I’m very grateful for the things I have. But that does not negate the unjust, oppressive, systematic starvation of my sexual identity, the hurt caused by the intentional and the unintential assumptions made about who I am and what I should enjoy based on it, or the pain from seeing how excruciatingly invasive all of this has become in my bedroom.

That’s what I wanted to write about, but I’m clearly in no state to be writing such things. I’m way too angry about it to make any kind of coherent sense. So like I said, move along, keep channel surfing. There’s nothing to see here that you haven’t seen a million times before.

Comments (24)