Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Wednesday Wanderings #8: Mixed Visions for the New Year

Category labels: D/s dynamics, Femdom, Male sexuality, Polyamory, Religious Evil, Stupid dominants, Vanilla life, Wednesday Wanderings

I missed last week’s Wednesday Wanderings due to Christmas, but I’m not really apologizing for that anymore. Instead, I’m just going to move right on into this week’s personal (and somewhat random) picks. Check them out:

  • 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.

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Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Love sex or fear god? That is the question.

Category labels: Communication, Community, Politics of sex, Religious Evil, Sex, Sexism
A flowchart of the sexual decision-making process from the point of view of religiously-minded people who view sex as a sin. All options lead to one of two choices: no sex or sex expressly for procreation.

The answer to god is sex.

Think about it. Think about the moment of orgasm. What is going through your mind at that very moment? Something? Anything? Maybe nothing?

For me, there’s nothing except the spectacular sensations filling my consciousness. My entire world becomes that orgasmic experience. For a split second, all that exists is me and my pleasure. There is no room in that brief instant for god, for morals, for emotion, or for thoughts. God bless that wonderful simplicity. Little wonder this self-empowering activity is such a threat to conservative institutions.

All of that stately “close your eyes and think of England,” or spiritual “becoming one with a greater power” stuff is what seems to me to be the perversions of sex, the unnecessary (and potentially harmful) search for greater meaning in something that is better off kept so incredibly simple. I do understand the desire to be able to transform one thing into another, to turn sex into connection, but there is a huge difference between saying sex is connection and saying that sex can become connection. (See also: your fantasy is not reality.)

Inherently, sex should be easy, and it should be simple, and it should be fun. Yet so many people are so uncomfortable with it, and popular culture dictates this unease as “proper” and correct in so belligerent a way, that so much of how we view sex—and consequently ourselves as well—is just as uncomfortable. This is a shame, because sex more than any other force that I can think of in the entire world is the single most universally shared experience, despite (or perhaps because of) its variations. What has the capability to bring people together is perverted into ammunition that keeps us apart.

Evidence of this belligerence is everywhere. It’s endlessly embroiled in politics, where the cultural blind spot about sex is so dangerous that even libertarians who challenge so called “pro-life” campaigns (as if being in favor of the right to choose an abortion makes you somehow anti-life?) are unaccustomed to directly tackling the subject of sex. Republicans and Democrats alike only ever talk about marriage, the presumably pre-sex part of life, and then babies, the presumably post-sex part of life. You would have to pull teeth to talk about sex itself!

From a recent Yahoo! News opinion piece called The One Question the “Pro-life” Presidential Candidates Don’t Want You to Ask:

98 percent of American women have done it.

37 million Americans are currently doing it.

Most of the GOP candidates oppose it.

What is it?

If you said “sex,” you were close. The answer is “use contraception.” In recent weeks, the GOP candidates have been asked a lot about their views on abortion but not one has been asked his position on contraception (or even prevention in general). Really big oversight. Maybe its because everyone just assumes they all support contraception. After all, who doesn’t?

Really big oversight indeed! And it’s typical of people’s understanding of what the “proper” way to communicate about sex is: to not to.

One of my favorite (comedic) examples of this in action is the following quote from the show House MD, which begins as a scene in which (male) Dr. Chase is staring at his attractive (female) colleague Dr. Cameron and spills coffee:

Dr. Cameron: I’m uncomfortable about sex.

Dr. Chase: But we don’t have to talk about this.

Dr. Cameron: Sex could kill you. Do you know what the human body goes through when you have sex? Pupils dilate, arteries constrict, core temperature rises, heart races, blood pressure skyrockets, respiration becomes rapid and shallow, the brain fires bursts of electrical impulse from nowhere to nowhere, and secretions spit out of every gland. And the muscles tense and spasm like you’re lifting three times your body weight. It’s violent, it’s ugly, and it’s messy. And if God hadn’t made it unbelievably fun, the human race would have died out eons ago. (Chase stares) Men are lucky they can only have one orgasm. Did you know women can have an hour-long orgasm?

Foreman enters

Dr. Cameron: (Cheerful) Hey Foreman, what’s up?

To me, this is a reminder that being closeted, uncomfortable, ashamed, or uneasy with something makes that something one of your vulnerabilities. Being closeted about being kinky, for example, makes me vulnerable to anyone willing to use my kinky sexuality to harm me, but being open and proud about it as a part of who I am, makes me (in the personal case) immune to such blackmail or attacks. But this can be generalized.

Most American people are in the closet about sex. Sex is thus easily used as though it were the threat of the executioner’s axe upon the populous. People fear being “outed” for enjoying sex for its own sake, as if pleasure were an intrinsically harmful thing in some way.

In most cases, religion is this axe. Have sex in one of any “uncontrolled” ways, and you have sinned, as the flowchart at the top of this post makes hilariously clear. That flowchart is taken from a page in the book Wages of Sin, whose description actually highlights this connection between religion and sex very nicely:

Throughout history, Western society has often viewed sickness as a punishment for sin. It has failed to prevent and cure diseases—especially diseases tied to sex—that were seen as the retribution of a wrathful God. The Wages of Sin, the remarkable history of these diseases, shows how society’s views of particular afflictions often heightened the suffering of the sick and substituted condemnation for care. […] More recently, medical and social responses to masturbation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and AIDS in the twentieth round out Allen’s timely and erudite study of the intersection of private morality and public health. The Wages of Sin tells the fascinating story of how ancient views on sex and sin have shaped, and continue to shape, religious life, medical practice, and private habits.

I am taking wholly and without alteration from Kate Bornstein when I say the following:

There are more people on Earth who love sex than those who fear god.

And that’s why the answer to god is sex. If it’s a war the Religious Right wants, then the Left should be using sex as their ammunition to fight back.

As usual, some delightful citations via the incredible Gloria Brame.

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Monday, October 29, 2007

Shalloween

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM psychology, Emotions, Exhibitionism, Feminization and cross-dressing, Politics of sex, Religious Evil

I don’t like Halloween. I never did. Halloween is the quintessential children’s holiday. It’s entirely about rewards with no consequences. When you’re a child, that means it’s about the candy. When you’re an adult, that means it’s about whatever the rest of your life can’t be about.

For sexually repressed adults (i.e., most adults), that means Halloween is about sex.

It’s an old joke in kink circles: Halloween is the vanilla person’s excuse to be kinky. Of course, a vanilla person’s definition of “being kinky” is something that people like me (who consider their intrinsic sexuality to be composed of what other people often consider taboo) think is very tame indeed.

A case in point is the traditional slutty costumes popular during Halloween. Sluts, gasp, are actually perceived as kinky to most people. That, in itself, could be an entire post. How incredibly right-wing puritanical it is that the display of sexuality itself is a taboo. Sex is a sin; birth is only possible through sex; therefore everyone is inescapably a sinner.

With the ridiculousness of the “Holy Virgin” syllogisms aside, Halloween is the one American holiday where Catholicism and anti-sex propaganda isn’t shoved down the throats of the largely blind and ignorant masses of people who “celebrate” the “holiday.” So, they do during Halloween what they can’t do elsewhere in the year.

Halloween is an opportunity to masquerade oneself as something you are understood not to actually be. It is an exemption from the hum-drum rules of daily living that bind you to the consequences of your actions. And people take advantage of this freedom in all sorts of interesting ways.

But why do people masquerade themselves like this in the first place? Most simply, they do this during Halloween as a means to experiment with attitudes, ideas, and expressions that they are either unfamiliar or uncomfortable with because during Halloween, everyone knows, there are no committments. All of this “acting out” is an effort to discover attitudes, ideas, and expressions that they are comfortable with.

Halloween is one giant societal bullshit session. It’s the religious and societal equivalent of a “Get Out Of Hell Free” card. How else would self-respecting religious boys and girls ever feel comfortable dressing up as such blasphemous things like ghosts and skeletons, or worse, like religious symbols such as members of the clergy, or even a crucified Jesus himself? This “Get Out Of Hell Free” card gives Jane the “Good Girl Next Door” the guilt-free opportunity to be a sexy nurse, or Catwoman (the superhero stereotype of the sexually dominant woman, a dominatrix one might dare say, which is unsurprisingly much rarer than the “sexy nurse” costumes). Likewise, it gives John the “Man’s Man Frat Boy” a chance to dress in drag.

Now of course, it is not necessarily the case that Good Girl Jane or Man’s Man John care all too deeply about actually being the thing they are pretending to be, a “sexy nurse” or simply a “girl” in these examples. But the fact remains that an absolutely overwhelming majority of girls who dress up for halloween turn themselves into the classic example of a sex object. Similarly, the overwhelming majority of boys who dress up for halloween turn themselves into comedic, if not actually accurate, representations of the opposite gender.

I get the question, “What are you going to be for Halloween?” just like everyone else does. I look around at the way other people live their lives and I see the need, the aching, screaming necessity most people have for just this kind of event in their lives.

“Me?” I ask. “I don’t like Halloween.” It’s far too sad a holiday, if you think about it; it’s the inevitable day every year when I see hundreds of thousands of people wanting and not having, and (worse) not even thinking twice about it.

Okay, after getting a bunch of comments on this post, it seems that either A) no one’s observant enough to comprehend my overarching point in this entry or, and this is the more likely explanation, B) this post’s brevity or terseness has caused people to latch on to ideas I didn’t intend as the main point. So, setting the record straight:

  • I do not believe Halloween is a “bad” holiday, that it should not exist, that it does no good, or that it can not entail a great deal of fun.
  • I do not believe that everyone who participates in the celebration is shallow, repressed, or otherwise unhealthy.

If you take the time to read this post without introducing your own stories and take me at face value and nothing more, which you should pretty much always do, you’ll see I never once made such claims, even though quite a few people have implied that I have. Fuck, I like looking at all the T&A just as much as you do, and even though I don’t personally enjoy dressing up to go trick-or-treating, I’ve gone to my share of Halloween costume parties and I’ve had a ball at most of them.

Instead, this post’s main intended thrust was a remark more akin to, “Yay, even repressed people get to have fun.” And yes, like it or not, a sadly gigantic number of people who enjoy this holiday are sexually repressed, confused, or otherwise have a characteristic that I will describe as unhealthy or unhappy. Furthermore, I don’t think anyone’s actually arguing with that point—we all know why you’re not.

Look, the bottom line is this: I don’t presume to tell you what to do in regards to you. In fact, I don’t believe I ever have, because doing so is a violation of the most serious kind—it breaks the rule of no imposition, a principle that simply states that the only thing I have a right to impose on others is how they should treat me. Yet this kind of violation happens every day, all the time, by people, by governments, by employers, and by culture and society, and we have become so used to it that we treat one another’s words as if such imposition was the intention even when it was not. That, my friends, is a tragedy.

Even though for many people it is not, for many others Halloween is just such a cultural example of that tragedy. That’s all I was trying to say in this entry.

See also Eileen’s Live and Let Die.

See also, Bruce Schneier’s The War on Different.

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