Tuesday, July 8, 2008

This is not the post you’re looking for

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Personal experience, Reviews, Sex, Sex toys, Vanilla life, Writing and blogging

The post you’re looking for is actually my new review of the Tantus silicone cock ring on Eden’s site. Unless, of course, you really are looking for this one, in which case read on.

It was recently my birthday. This is actually a bigger deal than it would otherwise be because I’ve just turned twenty four and, by my logic, this means I am entering my “mid-twenties.” For the first time in my life, I kind of feel old.

Of course, I’m not that old, but I’m still kind of old. It’s summer in New York City even though it’s winter in my new home on the other side of the world, which means school’s out of session. The new Executive Board of Conversio Virium is finding their feet, and though they’re doing a fantastic a job of it if I do say so myself, I notice all the little gaps in their knowledge about things. These are things that will come with time and experience, two things I seem to be finding plenty of in myself lately.

I’ve been a very busy bee and thus haven’t been paying much attention to this little corner of cyberspace except in the form of sporadic tweets where my real life intersects (as it often does) with the BDSM stuff. It is one of those cyclic things wherein kink takes a back seat to life. In part, this is simply a matter of lack of opportunity. I miss the public scene I know and complain about back in New York.

I think this has made play a form of comfort rather than a form of exploration, and doing a scene for comfort is not at all the same as doing one for personal exploration. I’m sure there’s a post in there, somewhere…. Ah, well. At least I am still getting new sex toys to review.

Comments (5)

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Young people into BDSM are not exceptional

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Beginner BDSM, Bisexuality, Community, Generation gap, Sex

Every so often, such as last Saturday night, I get to talking with a bunch of people in the BDSM scene. Most of these people are almost always decades older than me. At some point in the conversation, which usually turns into a friendly debate of sorts (because those are the kinds of conversations I enjoy having), I get complimented on my “exceptional” nature.

“Oh, but May, not everyone who is your age has the emotional maturity that you do to handle BDSM,” they’ll say, “You’re exceptional.” And then they’ll go on to tell me countless stories about how they saw some young people totally fuck up their lives by not “being ready” for BDSM play.

Of course, it’s kind of nice to be complimented on my emotional maturity, or my intelligence, or whatever it is they feel will drive their point home the strongest, but the truth of the matter is that it’s total bullshit. I am not that exceptional. Very few people are.

Here’s the lie: to be “ready” for BDSM, you need lots of life experience, commitment, maturity, and intelligence in droves. They say you will need these things so that you won’t freak out over what you’re getting into, so that you can spend the years it’ll take you to find the (increasingly less) underground culture that is the scene, and then enough intelligence to “get it” when you’re finally there.

Here’s the truth: BDSM is just like anything else and you’ll get out of it whatever you put into it. That means if you’re an idiot and you think being kinky is the next bi, you’re going to do stupid shit and you’re going to regret it. But you know what, that holds true if you’re 15 or if you’re 40 years old. Age has nothing to do with it.

It is true that 15 year olds have a lot less life experience than 40 year olds (duh). However, I think it’s just plain dumb to assume that because of this lack of life experience these younger people have less emotional maturity (or intelligence, or what-have-you) than older people. Just because you’re 40 doesn’t mean you’re more mature than me, it could mean you’ve just been acting really immature for 40 years. Come on, you all know the kinds of 40 year olds I’m talking about.

People often use my mere presence in the community as proof that you do need to be exceptional to be a 23 year old with a healthy BDSM lifestyle. “Where are all the other 23 year olds in several year long committed D/s relationships?” they ask. Indeed, I’ve asked that very same thing, too. Since there are so few of us, that must mean people like Eileen and I are exceptional. Right?

Well, maybe in some respects (we do write pretty cool blogs, after all), but what’s exceptional about my being heavily involved in the BDSM community isn’t how exceptional I am, it’s the fact that I’m involved despite the odds. In other words, the circumstances themselves are rather remarkable, but that does not mean that the cause of those remarkable circumstances is solely of my own doing.

Though I could easily take all the credit for being one of the few young people out and about in the scene, most of the credit belongs to the rest of the community that doesn’t see young people like me as capable members in equal standing. With consistent decrees that we need all that largely useless life experience to really be a part of the scene, how could young people ever hope to be engaged?

What’s even more bewildering to me is that this apparent necessity for life experience makes no sense. Not only is that kind of disrespectful (albeit in a good-natured sort of way), it’s also contradictory: more often than not, you’ll hear people tell newbies that they need to “unlearn” lots of cultural and social programming to feel comfortable with BDSM. Well, gosh, unless the unlearning itself is the goal of BDSM (which would make for a really really boring kink if you ask me), then doesn’t that put younger people in a far more advantageous position to be “ready for BDSM”?

The inaccurate representation that BDSM requires some kind of special life journey, different or unique from other, “less intense lifestyles” is really nothing more than the older generation’s self-consoling opinion. “It’s okay that it took me thirty years to come out to the community and start having kinky sex,” they tell themselves, “because I needed all that life experience to be able to handle it now.” On the other hand, for them, maybe that was really true. If I were born in the 60’s instead of the mid-80’s, I also might have needed quite a few more decades to get my head around the fact that masochistic or submissive urges are not sick.

That’s not what I needed as a young boy, though, because with information about sexuality finally freed from the stranglehold of large organizations (such as governments and religions), young people are way more capable of exploring their own sexuality safely than almost anyone gives them credit for. Most of us are also smarter than people give us credit for, and we’re also way more emotionally mature than they think.

As long as people like Miriam Grossman don’t get their way, this means younger people like me (and, hell, even younger people than me—damn, now I feel old) will be able to find our sexual comfort zones at much younger ages than the previous generations. And really, how can that be bad?

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Saturday, June 21, 2008

Call for participation: Hyperfiction and Hypertextual Porn

Category labels: Community, Erotica and pornography, Fantasy, Fetish, Sex, Technology, Writing and blogging

A few weeks ago I was geeking out about “web stuff” to Eileen, who was sitting across the café table from me sipping her gigantic flat white coffee. I was talking to her about iterative development processes, and how that matches how I think. Small bits, loosely structured, eventually coalesce and create something very refined, piece by piece, polish by polish. Somehow, in between all the geeking out, she remarked on a really great idea.

“Why don’t you write hypertextual porn, then?” Of course, leave it to us to turn a conversation that geeky into a conversation about sex—but still. It’s a really great idea: leverage the power of today’s Web to explore the creative potential of story telling. I started to do some research on the matter when I got home that night. Turns out, this idea is hardly new.

Indeed, this idea even has a name: hyperfiction, or hypertextual fiction. Nevertheless, there aren’t any really good sites out there that have compelling, engaging hyperfiction content.

Why not? I think it’s because hypertextual media is, by its nature, social. It’s social in the same way sex is social. For it to be really engaging, well, you have to engage other people. You have to link to other people. You have to share, and share-alike. You have to be social.

I know this because I tried to start a web site about hypertextual erotic literature. Well, okay, hypertextual porn—or htporn for short (and for funny geek references which I sincerely hope some of you will get). It’s in my playground. However, for the reasons above, it’s become clear to me that the way to successfully create this kind of content is not to do so alone. Besides, I don’t have anywhere near the amount of required cycles (free time) to really get a project like this—one whose direction is still undetermined and whose purpose is still largely an experiment—off the ground by myself.

So, consider this my Call For Participation. I’ve set up an introduction to the theory of htporn and a handful of other stuff on the web site. I’ve also set up a mailing list website with a specific hyperfiction discussion list that I encourage you to join—just send an email introducing yourself and your interest in writing (or reading, or whatever) htporn.

I’m not-so-secretly hoping lots of people will express interest in this idea and put forth their ideas. Right now, this project is really just an infant. It needs a bit of TLC and attention from folks like me and you. It also needs a bit of guidance and (dare I say it) discipline so it can grow up big and strong, knowing what it is and what it’s doing. And, along the way, there are going to be questions we’ll need to answer for it.

Even though I’m hosting this project, I don’t want to be the sole driver. I just really want to see this happen. That’s why I’m asking for your participation. Won’t you please come play with us?

Comments (3)

Monday, April 21, 2008

The Gadfly publishes an interview with myself and the VP of CV

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM psychology, BDSM safety, BDSM terminology, Beginner BDSM, Community, Masochism, Sex

This is probably old news to a lot of you, but for those who don’t keep up with news from Conversio Virium, I wanted to direct your attention (however briefly) to the latest issue of The Gadfly, Columbia University’s undergraduate philosophy magazine. As part of their Winter 2008 issue, the Gadfly has published excerpts of an email interview that Tyler, the current Vice President of Conversio Virium, and I agreed to do with Stephanie Wu, the Gadfly reporter.

I think the article, which is titled Tie Me Up: A Gadfly Interview with Conversio Virium and begins on page 13 of the PDF, came out really well. I hope it gives CV some more positive exposure to the Columbia University community, and to other colleges and universities as well. Here are a few choice samples:

Gadfly: Are there ways to think about pleasure and pain apart from the classic continuum defined by opposites, with a line in between marking the transition? Is the relationship between pain and pleasure actually circular?

Maymay: I think there are as many ways of thinking about pleasure and pain as there are people thinking about it. When you generalize, you begin to see that more people share classic opinions than those who share the radical ones, but that is true of anything, not just pleasure and pain. People who do SM often find themselves broadening their own awareness of what kinds of interpretations of pain and pleasure are possible, thereby increasing their own maturity and capability to navigate the world around them.

It behooves us to be humble, to acknowledge that we don’t know as much as we think we do. SM doesn’t suggest a relationship between pain and pleasure. On the contrary, SM challenges the relationships science, theology, morality, and other cultural norms have already established about pain and pleasure. SM doesn’t aim to indoctrinate, SM aims to free us from such indoctrination.

[…]

GF: Besides an interest in pain, what commonalities do the activities covered by BDSM share that are unique from other sexual interests?

MM: These things are grouped together largely because there is no other space where people can talk about them. Not even the Queer clubs do enough to educate people about how to practice these forms of sexual activity safely (both physically and emotionally) and consensually, and that’s okay as that’s not their place. These activities are grouped because they share a common physical theme. This is rough sex. Like a sport, people can get hurt. Like a sport, people can become very skilled in doing it in a safer, more effective manner.

You can read the full interview (PDF) over on the Gadfly’s web site.

Comments (2)

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Stuff I use for sex

Category labels: BDSM safety, Beginner BDSM, Fetish, Pic Post, Sex, Sex toys

It’s Thursday and all and I’ve not posted for too long. Australia is keeping me busy, but I’ve had these photos in store for this blog ever since I was packing, and I figure there’s no better time than the present.

Toy Bag Picture 1

A while back, Mischief made a pact with Switch and Boy to bare their toybags to the world. I don’t remember exactly how he wrangled a promise for the same out of me, but he did. My excuse for the tardiness of this reveal is, well, look at all that shit! I didn’t even know I had that many sex toys.

In fact, not even all of the sex toys Eileen and I had were in this photo at the time of the shot, and some of the items in the shot were items we (regrettably) never got the opportunity to use (like the big eye-hook and ring wall mounts from Home Depot). Alas, with our move to Australia, we’ve had to slim our collection down even further into two categories.

  1. The bare essentials, which we have brought with us in our luggage.
  2. The really-want-to-haves that we’ll (probably) be shipping as cheaply as possible to our new home Down Under.

If you’re brave (and bored) enough to read through it, here’s a pseudo-itemized tour of all the items you see in these photos.

At the top left of the photo, right beneath my feet, you can see the TENS unit we own. We’ve not used this much due to lack of experience with such toys and because it was a relatively recent acquisition, but I’m looking forward to learning about more of what it can (safely) do.

Laying alongside the TENS unit are two wooden homemade spreader bars—cheap one-inch diameter dowels with eye-hooks drilled into them, all from the kinkiest store in the world, Home Depot—laying atop our small and growing collection of three whips. Only the two whips with the green coloring are ones we use for play; they’re both four-and-a-half-feet nylon singletails. In fact, the one on the left was my first, and a gift—and still a favorite (thanks, dad). The other one, an old nine foot bullwhip we got for $25(!) at one of the Leather Pride Night Flea Markets is mostly for making loud noises in parks.

Back at the left edge of the bed, you can see our pile of rope. Most of it is MFP from Rainbow Rope, but there’s are a fair number of hemp bundles mixed in. We’re somewhat new to hemp and so we’ve got bundles from just about everywhere: Twisted Monk, Venus Ropes, Rainbow Rope as mentioned earlier, and I think I’m missing another vendor, too (sorry!). At this point, hemp is hemp is hemp to me just because I don’t have enough experience with it to really feel the difference, so I mostly look at price when I shop. (Ask Dov your hemp questions, he’s very knowledgeable. So are Switch and Boy.)

That said, the hemp is clearly far superior to the MFP and other synthetics if rope bondage means something special to you. Also, the different diameters of some hemp over others makes that length more or less suitable for certain things. Most of our hemp is 8mm thick, but for wrist, ankle, and other body-part bondage, Eileen and I are finding that the 6mm or even the 4mm is much better. Of course, for genital bondage, we’re strongly considering even thinner lengths, like 2mm in diameter. Or, y’know, really coarse twine from Home Depot.

We’ve also got a roll of bondage wrap (larger, left) and one of bondage tape (shorter, next to the ball gag). I absolutely adore bondage tape, and I’m not too embarrassed to admit that it’s partly because of the aesthetic. Pretty boys and girls bound in bondage tape are shiny, and the whole industrial tape-gag damsel in distress look is smokin’ hot. The only thing missing from this pile is vet wrap, which is probably more useful than both bondage wrap or bondage tape (especially for turning your human pet’s hands into paws), but it’s also more expensive.

Of course, along with the ropes and the rest of the bondage equipment is the EMT safety shears. Ropes and bondage wraps or tapes without safety shears are one of those bad situations you should take care to avoid finding yourself in. And, of course, you should make absolutely sure the safety shears can cut through whatever it is you’re being bound or binding in. How do you do that? You cut a small piece of it once before you play (not necessarily every time). You do lose a little rope, but that’s a lot more palatable than losing your life.

A good tip when buying rope is to buy one longer strand than you need and cut it yourself. So if you’re intent on purchasing two 15-foot lengths of MFP, buy one 30-foot length and cut it in half yourself. That way you know your EMT safety shears work properly.

Between the rolls of bondage wrap and bondage tape we have a standard-issue ball gag, vibrator, and nylon quick-release wrist and ankle cuffs. The ball gag, unfortunately was too big for me when I bought it because I got it at The Leather Man, a shop in the Village for gay men. Apparently, anything and everything made for gay men is way too big for me. Instead, when I shop for bondage gear, the only restraints that won’t slide right off me are the one’s in small women’s sizes. Unbelievably, even the most heteronormative-focused novelty shops, the ones you’d think would carry all sorts of little bondage things for men to put their heroin-skinny girlfriends into, don’t often carry restraints small enough for me.

Anyway, at the very corner of the bed on the lower left of the photo above (and much more clearly visible in the photo below at the bottom right of the picture), are three toys laying atop the case for Eileen’s Njoy signature product, the Pure Wand, which is nestled within the tender pink folds of…ahem, its case.

Toy Bag Picture 2

To the right of these things are a number of synthetic sex toys. There’s the unmistakable, must-have Hitachi Magic Wand and beneath it is a see-through (”Ice”) Fleshlight. Beneath that is a cyberskin pussy, one of the items from my EdenFantasys sex toy reviews.

Moving on, to the right of these sex toys lie our small but growing collection of dildos and ass toys. There’s the funny-shaped Aneros Helix in white sitting to the right of the Fleshlight and beneath that is the black Nexus Titus, both prostate massagers. Two black butt plugs lie beyond a cylinder containing the Mistress silicone dildo by Vixen, and next to these are the two medical-grade blue plastic attachments for the Hitachi Magic Wand.

Moving back a bit, there’s also a collection of metal cuffs of various sizes and shapes, mostly silver. Eileen’s favorite fire-engine red handcuffs stand out, as does the silver asshook—another gift from the generous and talented Boy. Then, of course, there’s a long bunch of black leather and nylon straps, buckles, and collars of various sorts. There are also (some of) Eileen’s play knives there, including her poniard and curved hunting knife, and her butterfly knives (those are the scariest ones).

Finally, the last patch of the bed is covered by our medical supplies: needles, gloves, gauze pads. There are also the sex essentials: condoms, lube (such as Babeland’s excellent Babelube), our strap-on harness, a blindfold (a Mindfold branded one, as well as a few soft pieces of dark fabrics), locks to go with our loose lengths of chains, and a number of other odds and ends. Our (sadly, now broken) graphite evil stick is there with the blue and white handle, as well as the Master keysafe, used for storing emergency copies of really important keys like the one to our chastity belt I sometimes wear (not pictured).

And, of course, the boy in the photo is me, wearing my “Vivid”-style Eternity Collar, as usual. Eternity Collars are making a name for themselves as being extremely elegant. I’ve worn my collar shamelessly for months on end, including time spent in the office. My office-mates thought it was “kinda hardcore” at first, but said nothing of it afterwards.

Though unabashedly overpriced, the collar is a great fantasy object, not to mention useful for relatively safely attaching leads and ropes to a bottom’s neck. When Eileen started kinking real hard on a certain porn story involving metal collars and was spending quite a bit more time than usual lusting over the pictures at the Eternity Collars web site, I knew I’d buy us one.

I’m also wearing a small leather wristband—a purchase from the innovative Leather by Danny of gripcuff fame—with the words “Boy Toy” engraved on it. Perfectly fitting for this photo.

Phew!

Comments (17)

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Firsts are always changes

Category labels: Community, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Femdom, Kink events, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Masturbation, Personal experience, Relationship, Sex, Uncategorized, Writing and blogging

One of the reasons I’m so interested in kink and sexuality is because it’s implicitly a big part of my life. It’s everywhere and nowhere at the very same time, not unlike how many people understand god. For me, my sexuality is akin to my religion: self-expression (and particularly sexual self-expression) is my prayer, I am my own god, and the pleasure-positive, queer-friendly, self-empowering communities of which I am a part are my Church.

I like the references to religious imagery apparent in much of my play even though the thought of religion in my sex life makes me feel viscerally repulsed. I won’t do religious-themed play (naughty priests, nuns, and even Rabbis spring to mind—all potentially sexy for some people if not for me), but I understand the impetus of those who do. I like getting wings, being referred to as an obedient angel, or the idea of being nailed to a cross. I am no martyr, for martyrdom and ultimate self-sacrifice is in many ways the epitome of what I find repugnant; I ask to be hurt, to be beat, to be etched and marked, because it’s what I want, not something I dislike that’s merely a path to something “more.”

Parts of my life, like kink, present themselves in interesting ways sometimes. They’re like habits, much in the way going to the gym is something that is at first difficult but over time becomes habitual and—not necessarily in a negative context—addictive. If I don’t get my kink fix for a while, I start getting antsy. The physical catharsis of a good beating goes hand-in-hand with emotional catharsis of some kind. It’s one way that I experience the connection between the body and the mind.

What I’ve found over the past few weeks is that, at least for now, writing about these experiences and continuing my own introspective explorations about myself, my sexuality, and how I relate to the world around me (as well as why the world around me is so fucked up), is similarly emotional cathartic. Yes, I’ll admit it: I blog as a form of self-treatment. And I’ve been itching to start writing again.

However, I’m a horribly change-averse person at my core, in spite of the fact that I am also occasionally an eager risk-taker. When I stopped writing often, it became difficult to start up again. So many pieces of my life are scattered about the floor around me, in piles waiting to be sorted, packed, and shipped off to the other side of the planet (I’m moving to Sydney, Australia, from New York City), that I desperately wanted to maintain some semblance of continuity and order among the change and chaos.

You’d think, naturally, that with all the preparations to be made, the telephone, Internet, gas and electric, and other utility accounts to close down, the bank accounts to open and close, the taxes to complete for the previous year, the stuff to move, the apartments (and jobs?) to find on the other side of the world, and everything else I have to do to move my whole life from one of Earth’s hemispheres to the other, that I wouldn’t be able to squeeze in time for more play. In fact, I expected to be so busy that kink would have to take a back-seat to the rest of my life until I was settled again. Boy, was I wrong.

In the past few weeks, I’ve played more often than I have in the past half-year. Furthermore, I’ve played with more people in less time than I ever have before—the exact figure would have been even higher had there been the time. I lament the fact that it’s only now, with my imminent retreat from the in many ways stifling New York City scene that I’ve suddenly experienced an explosion of play partner possibilities who are not only fun and intriguing but who also seem to actively desire playing with men who bottom or, (gasp!) are actually submissive and self-respecting. C’est la vie….

The experiences are not all incredibly intense in and of themselves, but the experience of my own broadening “promiscuity” and apparent desirability is incredibly disorienting, and surprisingly uncomfortable at the same time that it is very welcome. After repeated conversations about the topic, in which I often express confusion, doubt, and glee at the situation, the best I can come up with is that “I’m not used to being liked at so intensely,” to borrow one of Rona’s lovely grammatical idioms. Of course, I’m not oblivious to the reasons: I’m relatively good-looking even if I still don’t consider myself “hot”, I have a pretty wide and (to some) intense range of things I enjoy doing, and I’m an all-around decent person.

What’s so astonishing to me, then, is that other people have taken note of these things, too. Actually being in demand by people who’ve never even heard of me before, as opposed to being merely available, is a lovely, self-affirming experience. It’s the ego-boost I’ve heard so many women talk about. And I’m not too proud to admit that it was really, really nice to have.

The weekend after the Flea in Rhode Island, I went to a weekend-long private party near Boston, having been invited by a friend along with Eileen, and the experience (much of which is the foundation for the feelings expressed in this post) was the exact opposite of what I expected. Instead of feeling shunned, I felt wanted. I played each night, each night feeling a bit more comfortable than the one before, until on Sunday night I not only got beat in ways that made me moan when I moved for days, I also had my first semi-public orgasm and outright sexual experience with someone I’d just met.

Oh, it was tame, and relatively short-lived, but the fact remains that it was the first of its kind: invited to join Eileen and the top both she and I had met (and played with) earlier in the party on the floor in a corner of one of the party rooms, I lay back and the two of them proceeded to rub and caress my bruised body while he (the top) pressed a Hitachi Magic Wand against my penis. A few minutes later, while I was just beginning to start writhing in pleasure on the floor, my friend from Kink in Exile, who had just gotten through beating my thighs and ass with one of her metal pipes, joined our corner and took a spot rubbing my chest, nipples, and sides.

I was uncomfortable being the center of so much explicitly sexual attention. Three people, one of whom I didn’t even know before the weekend started and another whom I’d seen in person for only the second time, were now sitting around me while I lay on the floor and braced myself against the vibrator’s insistent buzzing. And at first, I really was bracing against it.

“This is not very like me,” I was thinking. It was weird and uncomfortable, and I wondered if they were actually enjoying this anyway, letting me just lie back and enjoy myself with almost no words exchanged about it. “Maybe there are expectations I’m not aware of. That’d be bad!” I closed my eyes early on to try to fend off any triggers for more doubt, and not being able to see is something that helps me turn inwards, to focus on the sensations in my body rather than the thoughts in my mind.

It took me a long time to shove the nuisance of my own self-doubt out of my head in order to relax enough to enjoy what they were doing. At the start I was giggly and clearly nervous, but they all reassuringly told me to hush. The orgasm built slowly, but as a result it was fierce and explosive and wonderful and it left me a little dizzy.

After it was over and I came back down from the high of the beatings and the orgasm, the newness of the experience struck me most clearly: I’m changing, too. For years, even though I’ve had due cause, I’d been walled off and detached from the social and sexual possibilities and opportunities laid out before me. No, they aren’t always there in such massive quantity as they were at this party for the first time, but I know they were there.

Maybe I’m starting to be ready to really say “yes” to a lot of the things I wanted but wasn’t ready for before. It took the right people, in the right place, at the right time, to make it happen. Just as it did when Eileen and I first met.

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Thursday, January 10, 2008

Why Orgasm Logger? Well, why not?

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM psychology, BDSM techniques, Chastity/Orgasm denial, Communication, D/s dynamics, Humor, Myths and misconceptions, Orgasm Logger, Personal history, Politics of sex, Sex, Sexual teasing and control, Technology

This is majorly cool: Viviane linked Orgasm Logger in her Links for January 4th, 2008 post and it’s since been picked up by Boinkology, and a few higher-profile bloggers are beginning to display Orgasm Logger counters on their sites, too, like Tom Paine. A few months ago, a search for “Orgasm Logger” revealed only a handful of hits but now Google shows over 1,300 results, which is quite a bit for a project I put a single night’s effort into months ago primarily for my own, personal use.

I’ve also been seeing discussions about Orgasm Logger surface on message boards and other blogs every so often. It’s a lot of fun to read through the discussions people are having and to see what they’re saying about it. Here are some telling examples.

This woman, on an Informed Consent discussion thread, says:

Having orgasms isn’t a competitive activity, it’s just something that happens, or doesn’t and it certainly shouldn’t be used as a measure of anything. In my opinion.

I have to say I agree with her regarding her view on the usefulness of orgasms as a competitive measure, but I disagree that it shouldn’t be used as a measure of something. Measure of what is the question. Well, I think that’s up to the person doing the measuring.

I never think of orgasms as competitive, just a lot of fun. They’re fun to have, and they’re fun for some of us not to have, and the fact that some of us are having more than others is also a lot of fun for some of us. I don’t think there’s anything in this world that turns me on more reliably and so thoroughly as watching my lover have a screaming-good orgasm. For me, when she has ten or twenty, or maybe even a hundred and I haven’t had one, that’s an even sexier thought. I like the disparity in the numbers, but I don’t feel competitive about it.

Naturally, kinky people into chastity play and orgasm control see the value of this tool really quickly. Later in the same thread, another woman writes:

I think the ‘logging’ idea would be a nice little extra feature for those who do chastity play.

And then another guy echoes her sentiment:

I can imagine it might be of use if a man were in a sort of chastity arrangement without a device i.e. based on trust, and monitored by a domme at a remote location.

Curvaceous Dee is (fittingly) ahead of the curve by already having experienced first-hand the intent of Orgasm Logger:

It was a great relief to finally come again. The very useful Orgasm Logger has confirmed to me over the past few months what I’d suspected for a while—that I like to get off every couple of days. Doesn’t matter too much whether it’s self-pleasure or pleasure with partners (both have their moments), but, almost like clockwork, every two days on average will see me gushing, groaning, and generally feeling great. Which explains why I’m always running out of ‘bedroom towels’….

Indeed, as she points out, keeping track of stuff let’s you know more about that stuff.

Here’s another blogger’s comment, one I really love:

I clicked, and found out this guy had his last [orgasm] 3.58 days ago, and this is a feed from an actual Orgasm Logger site! What an add-on to one’s blog! The ultimate in advance orgasm management strategy systems!

The ultimate in advanced orgasm management strategy systems? I think this blogger coined a new acronym: OMSS! Naturally, I can think of dozens of improvements to Orgasm Logger so I’m not going to be calling this thing “the ultimate” any time soon.

Of course, Lux of Boinkology said it best:

We’re both fascinated and confused by this application

In fact, that’s been the most common reaction, and it’s really interesting to me. Long before I created Orgasm Logger, I’d just been naturally keeping a tally on my orgasms. It seems to me like most everyone does this, if only not as mindfully as I do. Of course, what made me mindful about keeping track of my orgasms in the first place was my near-fetish for orgasm control, in a sexually submissive headspace.

I got really serious about keeping track of my orgasms about two years or so before I created Orgasm Logger. At first, I simply wrote down when my last one was, so I’d always know. Then I wanted to be able to easily share that piece of information with Eileen, so she’d be able to know whenever it interested her. To make that happen, I started recording my orgasms as events on my personal calendar, publishing those events as an iCalendar to a local WebDAV server I run for the two of us here at home, and then subscribed her iCal to the calendar feed I was publishing.

It worked flawlessly. Now I had a real database of all my recorded orgasms with embedded date and time, location, and participant information! It was pretty much all I needed. But it wasn’t perfect.

It didn’t do the things I was most interested in, which was tell me at-a-glance how long it had been since my last orgasm, the most personally interesting datum. I had to do that calculation every time I wanted to know. What’s today’s date? When was the date of my last orgasm? What’s the difference between then and now?

Obviously, computers are the answer to computational problems, so I started thinking about how I could get the computer to do everything I wanted. In the process, it occurred to me that lots of people heavily into orgasm control are always talking about “how long it’s been” or “what their last one was like.”

Hell, people who aren’t even kinky are talking about their orgasms left and right, up and down, inside and out, this ways and that ways! Moreover, the entire political debate over contraception, abortion, teen pregnancies, abstinence-only sex education, and a host of other issues, are all centered around exactly this topic: orgasms!

None of this would even be happening if it weren’t for orgasms, but I’ve yet to hear someone acknowledge that simple fact. It’s as though, if you were an alien, you’d think orgasms were what made the world go ’round, but nobody was allowed to talk about them directly.

Which brings me to my point. Orgasms are really important for a lot of people. What’s interesting, then, is why it’s so puzzling to so many people that I’ve made a tool to help people keep track of them. After all, throughout history, the one thing people have continued to do with nearly no change in behavior at all is come up with ways to keep track of the stuff that’s important to them.

No value judgement, no assumptions, just an awareness of what’s important to people and the benefits that can be garnered from using increasingly sophisticated tools to broaden that awareness. That’s what Orgasm Logger is about, for me. That’s what I think everything should be about, on a philosophical level.

No one would have looked at me askance if I wrote improvements to banking software, because money is very important to a lot of people. That’s why it’s tracked so rigorously. That’s why it’s used as a competitive measure of status, of wealth, and of many other things, even though a lot of us think that it shouldn’t be.

Why, then, do orgasms seem so out of place? Maybe the answer to that question is also the answer to a lot of other things that we as a country, a culture, and a species, are struggling with. Maybe understanding value, understanding why the things that are important to us are important, things that are currently so deeply ingrained in the cultural tropes of our society that we don’t even realize we can question, will help us in ways we can’t even imagine today.

That’s what I’m puzzling over.

Update: News of the existence of Orgasm Logger is still spreading, and it’s still getting the typical, puzzled and, in some cases, even hostile reactions I can pretty much expect from the mainstream world-at-large. Latest sighting was at a site called Dear Sugar.

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Monday, January 7, 2008

Because Submissive is an Orientation

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Beginner BDSM, D/s dynamics, Male sexuality, Myths and misconceptions, Personal history, Sex

Why are kinky people kinky? If you’re kinky, can you tell me why you are that way? Ask a kinky person this and I bet the most likely answer you’re going to get is “I don’t know; I just am.” Interestingly, ask a gay person why they’re gay, and you’ll get the same answer. Conclusion? It’s not rocket science. Kinky is an orientation, too.

But let’s delve a little deeper, noting for the moment that we will try to avoid the natural chicken-and-egg debate that always erupts from such digging.

We know there are lots of kinds of kinky, but they don’t. I know that a sexual orientation has lots of facets, different pieces that together form the make up of someone’s sexuality, the combined physical, psychological, social, emotional, and spiritual makeup of an individual. But again, they don’t.

Sexual orientation itself is a word most often thought of as a definition for someone’s desire for a particular sex, as in a physical anatomical construct, even though the word sexual, as implied earlier is often understood as a combination of so many more things than simply physical sex.

So, today, I propose that submissive is an orientation—a facet of desired sexual expression—of psychological power, just as straight is an orientation of sex.

It’s not a radical thought. It’s been talked about before. It’s very straightforward, and I’m sure even without a thorough explanation of what I mean most of you already know what I’m talking about. You know what I’m talking about, I’m willing to bet, because you feel it, too. Some of you are dominant—a valid orientation, as top reciprocates bottom, as gay reciprocates gay, and straight reciprocates straight—and some of you are switches.

Yet, somehow, I think the reciprocal ideas and validity that a sexual orientation that defines a desire for a particular sex and/or gender has done for ideas like “gay,” and “straight,” have not done the same thing for “submissive” or “dominant” because these “power orientations” (for want of a better phrase) haven’t been recognized as valid pieces of sexual componentry, only of sexual expression. In other words, being submissive is recognized as a valid expression of sexual desire (and even that’s pushing it, I know), but it’s still not recognized as a valid component of one’s sexual psyche.

This is wrong.

Being submissive is who I am sexually. I can not imagine being any other way. Furthermore, I have always been submissive sexually. The very first sexualized memory I have is one of a fantasy that involves orgasm control, and ever since then and probably from well before, control and power have been inexorably linked to my expressions of sexual fulfillment. In other words, for me sexual arousal is tied to feeling submissive; I rarely, if ever, feel turned on unless I also feel submissive (in one of myriad ways).

On this very blog, before I could articulate such concepts (which, somewhat amazingly, was only last year), I see vestiges of my submissive self thinking about this very thing, wondering “Is there such a thing as regular sex?” Regular sex, I defined at the time, was sex without a dominant or submissive power dynamic, sex devoid of the expressions of power imbalance that, to me (I am learning), are intrinsic to the very core of my sex drive. Without this power imbalance, and specifically without the power imbalance shifted so that I am a submissive participant, the sex is not sexy for me.

This makes sense. There are, obviously, no surprises here, and I came to the same conclusion in March of 2007 as I did today. It makes sense that I would get off being the submissive partner because I’m obviously submissive, doesn’t it? What’s the big revelation?

The revelation comes from the observation that this fact, this obvious and self-evident expression of who I am and how I want to fuck is not given a status anywhere near that even of the still-oppressed gay and lesbian identities are given. Homosexuality is regarded by mostly everyone, including its vocal opponents, as a part of who someone is. It’s recognized and understood to be intrinsic to a person’s sexual understanding. Can the same be said for those of us who seek submission and/or dominance?

Are you sure? I’ve heard people ask, “Is kinky the new gay?” Maybe this is why they’re asking.

In this day and age when same-sex civil union is a hot-button issue, and we as a species are still seemingly so far away from any kind of reconciliation with one another’s basic anatomical differences (including skin color, for pete’s sake!), any attempts to challenge this perceived as threatening to our insular social order are literally eviscerated from the community as though they were cancers. This is somewhat more understandable when you change your perspective and notice the similarities between that behavior and the behavior of our own cells that attack tumors in exactly the same way. But at least we, as a species, are getting better.

As Robert Wright reminds us, cooperation eventually trumps competition. At one point in history each Greek city-state thought villagers from other Greek-city states were subhuman, but eventually all Greeks agreed that all other Greeks were human—it was just the Persians that were subhuman. With our networked world today, by and large, we no longer see geographical boundaries as the ones that divide us and instead of where we live we’ve come to focus on how we live.

The fact of the matter is that I don’t want to live like certain other men. More topically, I don’t want to have sex like them. I’m often asked why I feel that way, which is a bewildering question to me. “Why don’t I want to have sex like that?” I repeat, dumbfounded, nine times out of ten. “Because it’s not sexy for me!”

“Why not?” the issue is pressed.

“Well, why do you think that’s sexy for you?” I insist.

“I don’t know. I just do.”

“Exactly.” Because submissive is an orientation.

Comments (28)

Saturday, December 29, 2007

It doesn’t matter if she’s got a brain when your dick is in her

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Communication, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Erotica and pornography, Masochism, Sex

The other day, Debauchette wrote the introduction to a post called On Boys and Pornography that promised to be a very interesting one.

If you say, “Can I come on your face?” or if you try to come on my face, I’ll assume you’ve watched a great deal of porn in your life.

Indeed, porn influences men’s (and women’s) expectations and ideas of sex, what it should feel like, what it should look like, and what we should think about it. I first discovered pornography back in 1994 when I was ten years old and was given free reign to explore the Internet. “Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!” most parents would cry in knee-jerk outrage, but I’d urge adults to entertain a more level-headed approach to the situation (which is not to say that I, nor my parents, approve or have ever approved of minors having free access to pornography by any means at all—but that is neither here nor there at the moment).

Since then, I do see certain and undeniable ways in which my exposure to pornography has affected my sexual development, and it has definitely impacted how I have sex today. I have, of course, seen a lot of visual pornography. Despite this, I think anyone who knows me would agree that there’s a distinct difference between how I approach those parts of social interaction that are sexual and how people of whom they say have “seen too much porn” do so.

This is why I was looking forward to Debauchette’s second piece: why are some men’s exposure to porn seen as the cause of an issue that I clearly know can not possibly, in isolation, be the entire story that explains the malicious intent these “porn-addicted” men seem to have? Turns out, she didn’t write the post I thought she might have, which makes me smile and want to take her out to diners to keep on talking about it over coffee re-fills somewhere.

When I take issue with porn, it’s the quality I dislike, not the genre. I dislike the tedium, the predictability, the fake tans, the plasticky breasts, the baseball caps, the lack of imagination, the boredom, the soundtrack, the lighting, the dialogue, the inauthentic orgasms, the lingerie, the decor, the overall assault on my sensibilities. But when porn’s good, it blows my fucking mind.

Nodding as I read this, these reasons are also why I consistently decry porn, even “alternative” porn, to be monotonous representations of the very same going-through-the-motions activities that are just not exciting on anything other than a vicarious, or worse, detached experience after the first or second viewing.

Yet two things beyond Debauchette’s well-made points struck me about her post. In this paragraph,

When I say that I can sense if someone’s watched a lot of porn, or too much porn, what I mean to say is that I can sense that their relationship to sex is largely visual. […] Since 90% of my libido is fueled by the physical chemistry and psychology (or, in rare cases, emotion) of the experience, in those situations I just prefer to go home and jerk off on my own. Sometimes to porn.

Debauchette claims that 90% of her libido is fueled by the “physical chemistry and psychology” of the experience of sex. Only rarely, she says, are her emotions involved in the lust. This is very interesting.

It’s interesting to me because, with recent analyses of my own thoughts and feelings, mostly regarding no-strings-attached (or “NSA”) sex, my explorations are increasingly leading me to discover what it is about sex that I find arousing, and therein lies a new distinction. Things that I find arousing are not necessarily the same things or the same reasons that get me to orgasm. In other words, things that make me attracted to a person are not necessarily the same things that I want to get off to.

The best example of this is intelligence, a display of which is the easiest way to get me to crush on you. Meeting someone who displays intelligence and talks about sex that way makes my dick rock hard. I mean real hard, and real fast.

Anyone with enough intelligence can probably turn me on in one way or another. Even exceptionally smart people I despise, I’ll admit, have sometimes appeared in fantasies torturing me with their arguments with which I disagree—and with a lot of psuedo-consensual, psuedo-forced sexual advances, of course! (Seriously. They’re some of the absolutely nerdiest fantasies I have ever had.) Smart people are sexy to me by virtue of their smarts.

However, that said, I don’t always (though, again, I do sometimes) find that their intelligence is what I’m after when I ask them for play, or for sex. To put it really painfully bluntly, the horribly politically incorrect phrase “it doesn’t matter if she’s got a brain when your dick is in her” holds true.

When it comes to sex, the reasons I’m attracted to someone are often the reasons why I want to have sex with them, but they’re not necessarily the same. Maybe the key to understanding “casual” sex, then, is to be able to consciously shift my focus from the thing that was attractive to the thing that is hot. Practically, still using the intelligence example, this means that I’m not going to be very attracted to a gorgeous bombshell who can’t put a sentence together, which means I’ll never have sex with that person in the first place.

This is enlightening because it highlights a distinction between what is attractive and what is orgasmic, for want of a better word. That’s an important distinction, because it plays right into the reasons why some people can find themselves fulfilled by cruising for no-strings-attached sex and why I seem to have been unable to do so, yet it also offers an explanation (or at least hope of one) to explain why my interest in “casual sex” (and, to a lesser extent, “casual play” in the kinky sense) is not a doomed endeavor.

The second thing that struck me about Debauchette’s post was this following part, not because of any unique insight but because of its common-sense value:

Porn will get better. But also, I suspect extensive sexual experience and a modicum of self-awareness will mitigate its influence.

Specifically, extensive experience with sex is valuable, when tempered with self-awareness. Those of us with a sex drive know this intuitively, and we are drawn to sex by our instincts. It’s a part of what makes us happy, and human.

Sex, especially the kind of sex I like to have, is also risky. Kinky sex is much riskier than vanilla sex for a whole host of reasons, many of them plainly obvious; my kind of kinky sex typically involves the heavy use of restraints, percussive implements, lots of roughness, and intense psychological stimuli that crank up the volume for things like power inequality skewed to my disadvantage. If I place this power in the wrong hands, such as someone with malicious intent, it’s obviously going to be dangerous and perhaps even downright lethal for me.

Yet even for vanilla people, sex can be dangerous, and is risky. This is why extensive experience is often denounced as a “Bad Thing”; the more you do it, the higher the chances of something going wrong. Nevertheless, extensive experience is obviously valuable, because it’s the only way to corporeally understand (duh!) what’s going on physically, emotionally, and even spiritually (if you’re into that sort of thing). This isn’t to say that it’s necessary to do this with multiple partners, unless the whole many-partners-thing is what you want to corporeally understand of course, nor is it to say that there aren’t other ways of learning about these things that aren’t intrinsic to the physical experience, but—especially for me—experience is the greatest teacher.

So how do you balance this risk with its obvious potential reward? Like anything else, you have to become educated about the topic in general and, more importantly, about you specifically. It’s nothing knew, and you’ve heard it before, but it’s true: “know thyself,” and then when it comes to sex, I’d like to add “and then explain thyself.” As it happens, pornography can be a very helpful tool to learning more about your sexual self but it can’t be expected to be a good substitute to corporeal self-examination or emotional self-awareness.

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Sunday, December 23, 2007

The boy next door is also bisexual

Category labels: Bisexuality, Communication, Community, Gender fluidity, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Polyamory, Sex

Today I was wandering around the blogosphere and found a link via The Sex Carnival to this report on a poll about the prevalence of bisexuality that made me stop and think. The brief article touches on quite a few topics that I am finding immediately relevant. These topics are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She told me,

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

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

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