(As an aside, it’s a great BDSM podcast, but sadly Axe blatantly sold out his integrity and, despite my helping him cut his podcast costs in half, he chose to stay sponsored by EdenFantasys for “a new microphone,” which is a severe blow to the respect I would otherwise accord him. I donated to his podcast before he was sponsored by them. I’ll never donate to a podcast sponsored by EF. And I’ll probably never donate to Axe again, either.)

Anyway, there were two main topics we talked about on his podcast. He edited the discussion down to two sections. One topic was KinkForAll, which he then released. The other was about Male Submission Art, which he never released. But I did ask for and he did give me the audio. And fuck it, I’ve been sitting on this for over a year and it’s probably time to talk more about Male Submission Art.

So here you go: a slightly-edited but mostly uncut recording of me talking about Male Submission Art.

I don’t currently have a sex life I’m happy with. I have sexual experiences I’ve enjoyed, and when I’m really fortunate these experiences happen in sequence. But a sex life? Sex as an ongoing, continual part of my experience in the world, like walking, or exercising, or relaxing, or breathing? No, I don’t have that.

When I speak to sex educators, many of them tell me the same thing. We struggle, just like you probably do, with having sex that satisfies us, with finding sex partners who freely share their desires so we can satisfy them. Despite the stereotype, just because someone knows a lot about sex doesn’t mean they do it often.

Shouldn’t we all “exercise more”? Shouldn’t we all “walk more”? Why shouldn’t we all have sex more? Not as some monumental occasion but, like exercise, or relaxation, as a mindful and intentional addition to a healthy lifestyle.

Sex and sexual expression is a part of life, like breathing. The desire for sexual fulfillment is as much an innate part of us as the desire to breathe. While we won’t literally die if we don’t have sex, nor do we require breathing education to learn to breathe, lacking a satisfying sex life can be as emotionally devastating as breathing in a way that doesn’t feel right can be physiologically damaging. Would you ever tell people who engage in certain, unconventional breathing exercises—as is the case in many meditative practices—not to do so? Then why do so many people feel justified in telling others not to have sex, either with others or with themselves?

It’s too easy to hate when you feel like you can’t fuck how you want, and that’s why I advocate for sexual education: to destroy a cause of hate.

One of the first sex education resources I ever found was JackinWorld.com, a website dedicated to male masturbation. (Jill Diddler is their unfortunately much smaller female-bodied counterpart.) What made it unique was that rather than being an erotic presentation with gratuitous cock shots plastered everywhere, it was a detailed, extensive, and user-generated collection of how-to guides for different methods of male masturbation, health information associated with each, and a community of (usually) respectful people who answered questions.

JackinWorld was, and is, the male masturbation equivalent of sites like How-To-Meditate (for example), just as valid yet unnecessarily controversial.

Another site that’s just as valid and yet unnecessarily controversial is Scarleteen:

Scarleteen has been the premier online sexuality resource for young people worldwide since 1998, and has the longest tenure of any sex education resource for young people online. We have consistently provided free, inclusive, comprehensive and positive sex education, information and one-on-one support to millions, and have never shied away from discussing sexuality as more than merely posing potential risks, but as posing potential benefits, something rarely seen in young adult sex education. We built the online model for teen and young adult sex education and have never stopped working hard to sustain, refine and expand it.

Scarleteen is “controversial” for two main reasons. First, that bit about sex education “posing potential benefits.” Sexuality is so often framed as a negative thing, that merely remarking on the potential benefits (never mind asserting its actual benefits), is deemed risqué, that it will somehow damage people to have this information. This negative-only framing is equivalent to limiting discussion of breathing exercises to the warning of, “You will hyperventilate, so don’t learn anything else about breathing!”

Second, unlike JackinWorld, Scarleteen’s focus is young people. So many people believe sexuality is inherently dangerous (thanks, sex-negative framing brainwashing) that it must be censored from young people. It is this desire to promote censorship that strikes me as abusive. When such vital, age-appropriate information about their own bodies and desires is withheld from children, I consider it a form of societally-inflicted child abuse.

We can all agree it is abusive to force people to breathe in a particular, prescriptive way, or to deny them the opportunity to do so healthily and safely—in fact, it’s not merely abusive, it’s called torture. Why do we not yet all agree that it is abusive to force people, through shame, guilt, or outright criminal prosecution, to have sex in a particular prescriptive way, or not at all?

Information about sex and relationships is critical not only for adults, but for young people as well. So support Scarleteen, and help lift sex education, like breathing education, to a higher plane.

Maymay has this blog post that’s been sticking with me recently called “How not to fuck up a D/s relationship.” In it, he correctly points out that successful relationships are not a monolithic mass but are actually made up of multiple layers (like onions or, perhaps, parfaits), each building upon the last.

There’s this concept of layers, or more technically a stack, that is fundamental to the construction of many things in our world today. The basic idea is that one layer builds upon the things it receives from the layer beneath it and provides things to build upon to the layer above it. In this way, a robust and reliable system can be developed—and maintained—by segmenting different pieces of the system.

I think that a D/s relationship could benefit from a construction similar to this. It’s the way I think about my relationship with Eileen. I am at once her friend, her lover, her boyfriend, and her slave. Indeed, I am her slave because I am her boyfriend, and I am her boyfriend because I am her lover, and I am her lover because I am her friend.

I was reminded of this because, for the past two weeks or so, there’s been a kind of dissonance between Belle and I that’s taken the wind out of the sail for the sexual part of our relationship. […But o]nce the issue with the lower stack was resolved, the issue with the higher one was, too.

Now, Thumper’s blog is perhaps the only “sex blog” actually about the sex its author has that I don’t outright dislike for that fact. I hate most sex blogs, and even the ones that aren’t total bullshit (either because they are fiction or because they’re just flat-out terrible) give me pause since reading about someone else’s sex life while you have none of which to speak feels kind of like banging your forehead into a concrete wall over and over again. (Which, if it’s not obvious to you, is not my kink thankyouverymuch.) But I keep coming back to read Thumper’s blog because his ability to share his experiences with such sanguine simplicity while using marvelously empathic language leaves me feeling like I’m living vicariously through him.

And, for the record, there’s simply no other sex blogger whose sex life I want more than Thumper’s. Except possibly Tom’s. Sure, Thumper’s innately emotional phraseology can sometimes trigger downright rantings from me, but if you want to read about the sex life I wish I had, just read Thumper’s blog.

Anyway, beyond the fact that Thumper’s post was really life-affirming (literally) to read, it sparked a few comments that develop the D/s relationship layers (or stacks) idea further in a very valuable way. Mykey very keenly noted:

I might add though that the layers feed back to each other. I’m a better sub because [my partner Sandy and I] are in love. But I fall more in love when I see my submission is appreciate and valued. That is, a higher stack feeds back and strengthens the lower one as well.

Absolutely. And in the case of a sexual relationship, abso-fucking-lutely. This is true, techies like me will note, of many other systems whose architecture makes fundamental use of the layers concept. The Internet’s TCP/IP stack (which provides loads of sexual inspiration, if you’re looking), has an entire process for sending messages up and down its neighboring layers. So, too, must human relationships.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is a relationship that begins when two lovers’ eyes meet across a crowded room, suddenly feeling lustful for one another. (Doubly true if this is a sex party.) These weren’t “friends first” situations, which means the initial spark for the relationship happened, in this parlance, on a higher stack, the lover layer. So the sex can beget friendship and, like a tree, the relationship grows both roots heading downwards and branches heading skyward.

In Thumper’s case, as he puts it:

I think in Belle’s mind my chastity has stopped being just a game we play. It’s been elevated over time to be a fairly significant commitment I’ve made to her. A sign of my devotion. A permanent part of our relationship. And for some reason, I played right into that by equating my chastity to her [far "lesser"] commitment. So, I guess, what this boiled down to was a conversation about our commitments to each other and how we need to keep them. And a tacit implication that I will probably be chastised for the rest of my life.

[…]

Before, I had developed a kind of begrudged resignation toward the device and had more or less lost my interest in being sexual with or even touching Belle. Last night, though, I was all over her and fell asleep clutching her body, my hands up under bedclothes. Her hand was down around the device and she stroked my balls as she fell asleep and I just about melted. On the way into work this morning, I sensed the tube on my body and the stirring of the cock inside and a warm, excited fluttering was in my chest.

In other words, as Mykey observes, Belle considers chastity to be a foundation layer now. And that not only makes sense, it’s an absolutely critical thing for anyone—straight or not, vanilla or not—to appreciate.

We’re so often told sex, or fetishes, destroys relationships. But for many people, it’s one of the strongest ways to maintain and even strengthen one healthily.

Since I was a boy, I have been confronted with the maddening reality of being told to second-guess myself, that due to who I am (a person diagnosed with bipolar disorder) I can’t trust my own thoughts or feelings. Then I grew up and I learned that certain words do not mean to others what they mean to me. This has made me rather persnickety with regards to the lexicon of sexual speech.

Most people whom are more-or-less familiar with sexuality minorities tend to use “kink” and “BDSM” as interchangeable—that is, if they know what BDSM is. However, my experience is that those who are not already trained to think or speak in that fashion use “kink” dramatically differently. In thinking about this, I return, constantly, to Emily Rutherford’s sociological/historical musings on the same topic:

[T]o me “kink” was synonymous with “BDSM,” and I had to wonder […] where I, whose realm is primarily queer identity and politics, would fit in. […] As the LGBT community becomes increasingly mainstream and increasingly integrated into a “straight” (for lack of a better word) paradigm, what takes its place as the radical outlier? Maybe “kink” is the new “queer”; […] I don’t think it’s erroneous to draw parallels to gay liberation, when a minority sexuality community decided it was going to establish its own boundaries (or lack thereof), and not allow the law or the medical profession or anyone else to do that for them.

I also frequently cite and share Emma’s KinkForAll Boston presentation (shown above), “Defining ‘Kink’,” in which she says:

The idea that [kink] “practitioner[s] are … considered perverts by ‘outsiders’” either conflates Kink with BDSM and nothing else, or conflates it with Fetishism [but i]f we hold Kink to its definition as “a term used to refer to an intelligent and playful usage of sexual concepts” how can it become a pejorative that turns people into “perverts”?

In other words, certain colloquial usages of “kink” that are used to draw a line in the sand—to draw the speaker’s preferred line in the sand—reify the hegemonic formulation of sex as dichotomized into obscene or decent acts. Emma goes on to say:

We know as well about what Kink shouldn’t be – exclusionary, prejudicing. Kink is not BDSM and BDSM alone. In fact, there’s no reason that Kink should necessarily be opposed to conventional sex – think of it as Sex 201. […] One can do Kink just by talking, one can have a Kink just by knowing enough to know what it is that really gets your motor going.

When I have conversations like this with people, bringing this point up inevitably raises a frustrating question: “If one can ‘do kink’ just by talking, what do you say to be kinky?” It’s frustrating because it’s the wrong question, still caged in the antiquated notion that kink is what you do instead of why (or how) you’re doing it. It implicitly creates an “other” category based on activity, just as gays are currently demonized by bigots for belonging to an “other/not-straight” category of self-identity.

At the recent CARAS conference I attended, Dr. Marty Klein’s keynote touched heavily on the topic of “othering” with regards to sexuality narratives in culture. He writes:

The general impression of kinky people is that they are a special, identifiable group, different from the schoolteachers, dentists, grocery clerks, and bus drivers we encounter every day. Different from “us.” And unlike “us,” dangerous.

This idea hurts everyone.

[…]

“Kinky sex” is a vague, flexible category—and sexuality is by its very nature ambiguous. If you tingle when you’re playfully spanked, are you “kinky?” […A]s “kinky sex” and its practitioners are demonized, everyone is concerned—am I one of “those people?”

[…]

I’d like to destroy the idea of binary contrast—that kinky and non-kinky sex are clearly different.

Instead, I suggest that kinky and vanilla sex are parts of a continuum, the wide range of human eroticism. We all slide side to side along that continuum during our lives, sometimes in a single week.

(Emphasis mine.)

There’s a subtlety in the way he uses the word “kink” that many other sexuality educators don’t seem to pick up on. He isn’t using it as a synonym for any other word. He doesn’t use it as a literary device to inject variety when he’s talking about some specific activity like “spanking” (or caning, or flogging…). He doesn’t even use it to refer to a uniform group of people.

I believe very strongly that sexuality educators must develop an understanding of “kinky” that honors its inherent heterogeneity. Its diversity offers immense cultural power. Pigeonholing “kink” is a disservice to already-self-defined groups, but especially to those people in the equally-nebulous “mainstream” who desire “kinky things,” but who think of such things as, say, strap-on or anal sex.¹

More plainly, ask a BDSMer if they think strap-on sex is “kinky” and the answer is often no. Ask a “vanilla” college student the same question and the answer is almost always “yes.” That’s a telling and important difference and I urge us to honor that reality, for our own benefit, and the benefit of the sexual freedom movement as a whole.

As Dr. Klein says:

Some people like being emotional outlaws. They’ll always find a way to get the frisson of otherness. But most people don’t want to live that way.

I don’t. Do you?

1. I keep hearing some BDSM’ers, in their devout isolationism, question this usage. But my observations are, in fact, accurate. See, for example, “kinky” expressly used as a term for anal sex at the end of this article at Slate.

One night last week, I was mugged on the street. Although I took a blow to the throat and I had my bag, my laptop, and some other personal affects stolen, I was also very lucky. You see, I was mugged right underneath a street lamp, and since the corner I was standing on was very brightly lit, after the muggers grabbed my bag they bolted to the shadows as fast as they could.

While it was a rattling experience, it also highlighted a principle I intuitively already knew: criminals hate light. They don’t want to be seen, and light makes what they do more visible. In other words, it makes their activity more transparent.

Transparency is, briefly, the combination of accessibility and accountability. Accessibility is the characteristic of some bit of knowledge being available to all interested parties; having access to information. Accountability is the capability for an action to be traced to its actor; knowing who did what, and when.

For obvious reasons, accountability is a horrible thing for criminals but it should, at least in theory, be a great thing for law enforcement, activists, good Samaritans, and anyone else who wants to strengthen civil society. One way to better understand this is to look at accountability’s opposite: scapegoating.

In M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie, scapegoating is explained:

A predominant characteristic…of the behavior of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at any one who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection.

So what does transparency have to do with activism? To answer that question, let me tell you a short story about Craigslist.

A Short History of Craigslist

In 2007, Craigslist is arguably the most popular classifieds service in the world, but there is no “Adult Services” section. Instead, an “Erotic Services” category that has existed for well over 5 years offers users the opportunity to post classifieds for free. The zero-dollar price tag undercuts similar erotic services classifieds being sold by mainstream newspapers and other online businesses by, well, infinity.

In March of 2009, a man by the name of Phillip Markoff kills a masseuse advertising on Craigslist, and is quickly apprehended thanks to digital sleuthing in cooperation with Craigslist. However, Markoff is dubbed “The Craigslist Killer” by the media and Craigslist’s CEO along with its founder, Craig Newmark, become political whipping boys.

Two months later, in May, under pressure from certain feminist and human rights advocacy groups, as well as numerous attorneys general, Craigslist replaces the Erotic Services section with “Adult Services” and begins charging for the ads. It is believed that creating a paper trail with transactions through the website will further aid police in quickly identifying any criminal activity by users of the website. Sure enough, it does, and in April of 2010 the police win a major bust against the Gambino mafia family after they posted ads on Craigslist’s Adult Services section offering sex with underage girls.

Despite Craigslist’s cooperation in this and other investigations, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and others issued a subpoena to Craigslist in May of 2010, only 1 month after the Gambino family bust, alleging that the company was facilitating and profiting off child “sex trafficking” and slavery. Over the next few months, so-called “anti-trafficking” groups, like the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women led by Norma Ramos, along with anti-prostitution groups, like Prostitution Research and Education led by Melissa Farley, grow increasingly loud, staging protests outside Craigslist’s San Francisco offices.

In September of 2010—that’s this month—Craigslist removes the “Adult Services” section entirely under pressure from these same groups, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, and 16 other attorneys general, 13 of whom, including Blumenthal, are up for reelection this year. (No, that’s not a coincidence.)

How “anti-trafficking” is often code for “pro-censorship”

Here’s the thing: the overly-hyped “sex trafficking” scare is possibly the largest, most evil, and most well-orchestrated myth of the abolitionist “feminist” movement. The propaganda spewing from groups like The Rebecca Project is unmistakable. Their wildly inflated numbers would be laughable if they weren’t so mindlessly regurgitated as facts by the mainstream media.

According to The Rebecca Project’s executive director, Malika Saada Saar, “An estimated 100,000-300,000 American children are at risk for becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation.” Critical thinkers like Dr. Marty Klein call this out for what it is:

“At risk!” Not in any way harmed, just vulnerable! The technical word for this is “nonsense.”

Make no mistake: the scare tactics used by groups like The Rebecca Project are deliberately designed to manipulate public policy by disguising a moral crusade to prohibit voluntary prostitution—sex work—as though it were a grassroots effort to combat sex trafficking. And they’re not even being coy about it.

At an international gathering of anti-porn activists in Cambridge in May, 2010, a “National Planning Meeting to Eliminate Demand for Commercial Sex” was sponsored by the Embrey Family Foundation and the Hunt Alternatives Fund. Starting at the very first sentences of the very first paragraph on the very first page of the PDF report, the trafficking boogeyman is trotted out:

Most public and private resources dedicated to human trafficking in the past decade have been crisis oriented, understandably geared toward rescuing and rehabilitating victims and, to some extent, prosecuting the perpetrators. However, policymakers, academics, and activists increasingly recognize that the endless supply of victims won’t abate unless we combat the demand for trafficking.

Then on page 4, in a prominent pull-quote, lauded anti-prostitution activist, Guardian journalist, and feminist media fear-merchant Julie Bindel says:

We decided we wouldn’t make a distinction between women who are coerced and [women] who choose. If you try to make that distinction, you will get nowhere when focusing on demand.

Their agenda could not be more clear: it’s not about sex trafficking, it’s about prohibiting prostitution. This, despite the US State Department’s unambiguous exclusion of voluntary prostitution as a form of trafficking:

Prostitution by willing adults is not human trafficking regardless of whether it is legalized, decriminalized, or criminalized.

—Trafficking in Persons Report, 10^th Edition, page 8

It was perhaps Susie Bright who described people like Julie Bindel, Norma Ramos, and Melissa Farley best:

A casual observer may wonder … “Aren’t the Trafficking-Fighters just decent people trying to save the vulnerable and innocent?”

Uh, no.

[…T]he Hooverites who have called for the disembowelment of CL are a different breed. They do not give a rat’s ass about children’s rights, women’s victimization, or anything else. They are the same companies who sponsor “Palin-esque” candidates, Christian Lunacy funds, forced-birthers, racist smear campaigns, gay-hating crusades. What’s worse, their leaders are indifferent to their stated “issues”—they believe themselves to be a personal elite, so close to God and Money that what the “little people do” is not relevant to them.

You won’t find the anti-Porn, anti-Trafficking Activists in the domestic abuse shelter, the rape crisis hotline, the emergency room, the orphanage, the refugee camps. Heavens, no. They have no interest or knowledge of what goes on in the trenches. They are actively fighting sex workers all over the world who have articulated their needs and rights. They don’t want anyone to have any kind of sex they don’t sanction. They are FRAUDS.

At the online magazine Sex and the 405, Anaiis Flox says of Craigslist:

Over the past few days, I have noticed an increase in the number of ads that suggest a monetary exchange for sex.

This surprises absolutely nobody. Without an “Adult Services” section, the ads that used to populate that section, regardless of whether they were actually advertising legal activity or not, are now re-appearing elsewhere on Craigslist—y’know, the free sections without a paper trail. Leading anti-prostitution crusader Melissa Farley has already condemned Craigslist’s casual encounters section. Is that section next on the chopping block?

“Adult Services” classifieds are apparently the online feminist version of the Ground-Zero Mosque lunacy. Only the deluded are questioning the legality of Craigslist’s classifieds business itself because Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act is squarely on Craigslist’s side:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

This single sentence, means Craigslist isn’t generally liable for what its users do, probably…gave birth to Web 2.0 and modern social networks, and also protects Facebook, Blogspot, Flickr, and innumerable other Web sites. It lets news organizations…permit readers to post comments without prior approval by an editor, says technology industry expert Declan McCullagh.

In other words, if “Adult Services” classifieds are unacceptable in the section Craigslist was pressured to create for them, exactly where should they go? (Colbertslist?) Another online classifieds service, Backpage.com, has now been sued by the same anti-trafficking groups for the same reasons Craigslist was pursued. If Backpage.com also removes similar ads from its site, what’s to stop the very same content from reappearing on Facebook, Blogspot, Flickr, or innumerable other Web sites, and more importantly, what will the prohibitionists’ solution be?

Actually, we don’t need to guess. Malika Saada Saar, other groups like hers, and their criminally shortsighted Attorney General puppet Richard Blumenthal are already exploring revisiting Section 230:

“These prostitution ads enable human trafficking and assaults on women,” Blumenthal said […]. “Craigslist says it cannot be held legally responsible for anything on its site,” he said. “My belief is strongly … [sic] that we need to change that.”

This clearly shows that the issue of trafficking and sexual slavery is just window dressing for their real agenda: instituting content-based restrictions on anything that doesn’t meet their narrow religious or ideological view of sexual morality. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Norma Ramos, Co-Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women:

We at the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women see prostitution as the world’s oldest oppression and we see it as being at odds with any goal of achieving equality rights for women and girls.

Ms. Ramos and many purported “anti-trafficking” groups like the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, Donna M. Hughes’ Citizens Against Trafficking, and others are in no uncertain terms actually anti-prostitution and pro-censorship lobbying groups.

Pitting free speech against human rights is a recipe for disaster

Ironically, the people best-equipped to help law enforcement combat sex trafficking are sex workers, the same people Farley and other abolitionist feminists either demonize or discredit. Last week, the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) issued a press release:

Purported rights groups, such as Change.org, have ignored sex worker voices while wrongfully vilifying Craigslist as a cause of—rather than an ally in stopping—trafficking. The continued silencing of sex workers, the trend to shut down the spaces where we communicate and the disregard of our expert knowledge demonstrate clearly that these efforts are more about stomping out sex for sale in general than in protecting those who are actually abused.

They’re right. I only wish SWOP would have called Change.org propagandist Amanda Kloer out by name. It should surprise no one that it is sex workers, not these “human rights” groups, who are addressing the problem in a constructive way. And there are other forces at play here besides just the pro-censorship crusaders.

Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis notes that the mainstream media frenzy has been conspicuously silent on the fact that Craigslist is a direct competitor to their own classifieds business:

Since craigslist and the internet have existed, newspaper classified revenue has fallen by $13 billion a year. [...T]he law is on craigslist’s side even if its enforcers are not and that this is a matter of free speech, which should put The Times and its journalists on craigslist’s side as well. But they’re not.

Jarvis is correct that as far as Craigslist, The Times, and other publishers are concerned, this is a free speech issue. But the question of trafficking is not a free speech issue. Trafficking is criminal coercion, which makes it distinctly different than all legal “Adult Services,” and even different from the currently-criminal activity of prostitution.

Conflating sex trafficking with prostitution is a prime example of what Dr. Marty Klein calls a phony category:

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

Public discussions of sex suffer dramatically from this treatment. Morality groups, the media, and politicians often complain about the ‘serious problem of x & y.’ Even worse, they’ll say ‘the rate of x & y is increasing,’ without admitting how much of each is involved.

This tendency is glaringly obvious in any examination of the media’s hysterics surrounding online classifieds and sex trafficking.

The Guardian:

Thousands of ads continue to be placed each day that list charges for encounters. Many include…flags for underage prostitution.

The Chicago Tribune:

…there is growing evidence of human trafficking, child exploitation and prostitution through ads on the website.

And of course, the Attorneys General own letter:

The increasingly sharp public criticism of Craigslist’s Adult Services section reflects a growing recognition that ads for prostitution — including ads trafficking children — are rampant on it.

Sex trafficking, a subset of human trafficking, is estimated by all credible reports such as the ones by the International Labour Organization to be around 10 percent of all trafficking crimes. That means 9 times more people are trafficked for non-sexual forced labor (slavery) than for sexual purposes. And yet leaders of these so-called human rights groups have the audacity to all but flat-out deny the very existence of labor trafficking. To wit, founder of the misnamed Prostitution Education and Research organization, Melissa Farley, offers this analysis on page 176 of her book, Prostitution, trafficking, and traumatic stress:

In order to defend prostitution as sex work, trafficking was articulated as gender-neutral, with labor trafficking and sex trafficking collapsed under the same rubric as ‘trafficking in persons.’ Otherwise it would be too evident that the ultimate harm of sex trafficking is the decidedly gendered condition in which the trafficking victim is transported into—prostitution.

So why does the media along with abolitionist feminists so consistently tie “trafficking” with sex trafficking, despite it being only one-tenth of trafficking crimes? I think, and this is disturbing, because it’s “sexy”; that is, it gets publishers like The Times page views, it offers politicians a politically expedient opportunity for grandstanding, and it gives pro-censorship crusaders like Farley a way to evade critical scrutiny. As Anaiis Flox argues:

How many of you people who are so up in arms about the exploited have marched with the Student/Farmworker Alliance? Boycotted Burger King when they refused to pay an extra penny for tomatoes so that consumers could ensure no debt peonage came at the expense of their burgers? How many know what the Coalition of Immokalee Workers does?

“No one really cares about Mexican dudes working in kitchens,” said sex educator and sex worker activist Audacia Ray in a recent interview with sexuality netcast Kink On Tap. She’s right. They don’t.

Indeed, these abolitionist feminists are so wrapped up in prohibiting prostitution that they are not only damaging the safety of sex workers but actively destroying law enforcement’s best tools to stop sex trafficking by driving the trade underground. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, they are also diverting public attention and resources from the human rights abuses of 90 percent—90 percent!—of human trafficking crimes.

Danah Boyd, social media researcher and Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society unequivocally condemned the anti-Craigslist crusaders:

If I believed that censoring Craigslist would achieve [justice], I’d be the first in line to watch them fall. But from the bottom of my soul and the depths of my intellect, I believe that the current efforts to censor Craigslist’s “adult services” achieves the absolute opposite. Rather than helping those who are abused, it fundamentally helps pimps, human traffickers and others who profit off of abusing others. […] Craigslist is not a pimp, but a public perch from which law enforcement can watch without being seen.

Visibility serves many important purposes in advocacy. Not only does it motivate people to act, but it also shines a spotlight on every person involved in the issue at hand. In the case of nonconsensual prostitution and human trafficking, this means that those who are engaged in these activities aren’t so deeply underground as to be invisible. They’re right there. And while they feel protected by the theoretical power of anonymity and the belief that no one can physically approach and arrest them, they’re leaving traces of all sorts that make them far easier to find than most underground criminals.

In other words, anti-prostitution activists leading the charge in attacking Craigslist are doing nothing other than scapegoating—they’re perpetrating evil. Their behavior falls squarely in the category of anti-justice.

Transparency—visibility—is the single strongest weapon against corruption. By implying that censorship is a required property for gender equality through their manipulation of public discourse about these nuanced but ultimately very simple issues, abolitionist feminists are contributing to the corruption they claim to be ending.

To quote Danah Boyd again:

Taking something that is visible and making it invisible makes a politician look good, even if it does absolutely nothing to help the victims who are harmed. It creates the illusion of safety, while signaling to pimps, traffickers, and other scumbags that their businesses are perfectly safe as long as they stay invisible.

No one is saying that a conversation about the merits or demerits of prostitution or about the much-needed efforts to stop trafficking crimes shouldn’t take place. But justice won’t be served by having one conversation instead of the two very different ones that need to be had here. And for all their specious assertions of being human rights advocates, it is the loudest anti-Craigslist voices who are turning off the proverbial lamps on our street corners and running into the shadows.

I’m angry because we live in a world where we’re made to feel afraid of our own bodies, and of touching our bodies, and of other peoples’ bodies, and touching them, and of other people’s bodies touching. These things should be beautiful, but because some people aren’t comfortable with them, nobody is allowed to be.

I am angry because parents are made to distrust their own children, children are made to feel like—and even prosecuted as—criminals, and when a woman respected enough to become the Surgeon General of the United States said that maybe, just maybe, if we don’t frighten kids away from masturbating they’d be more knowledgeable and responsible about sexuality, she lost her job. And this sex-negative culture is so strong, now it may even pervade the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists—the people who are supposed to teach us about sex and our bodies.

And I’m angry because I feel like I can’t make myself heard, and because too few others are speaking up. I’m angry because if you do speak up, you’ll get attacked. You’ll be accused of terrible things, like being a child molester, or enabling rape.

I’m not angry because I was attacked, I’m angry because anyone could be, at any time, and nobody will even bother to watch the whole video before passing judgment. And everybody just accepts this, as though it’s natural for the world to be like this. But it isn’t natural—our culture was manufactured this way.

We could all trust a little more, and panic a little less, and everything would be so much better. But I can’t make that happen, and I can’t make people listen to me. Even if people wanted to listen, they’d have a hard time because other people make sure you can’t read what I write or hear what I say in spaces like public libraries. But most people won’t even try, simply too afraid that they’ll be viewed as dirty, porn-loving perverts.

So I’m isolated, and I’m angry. But the one thing I refuse to be is quiet. Because this culture is telling us we’re supposed to be afraid, and silent, and “decent.” And if I buy that, then I’ll be just as hollow as the lip service this fear-based culture pays to honesty.

Well, fuck that. I’m a person, too. And I still have sex, though not as much as some of my critics seem to think that I do. (Actually, that’s their fault, too, considering the enormous amount of time I spent managing attacks against me.) I hope someone’s getting off on it, because I’m not.

And speaking of not getting off, that’s one way I enjoy sex even without “having sex.” Just lucky, I guess. ;)

Anywho, I’ve been catching up with some of my favorite sex bloggers—y’know, the ones that write about what sex means to them, instead of who they fucked last weekend—and I came across Push me, please by Thumper. In it, he writes:

I tried to explain that there’s a desire within me to go far beyond my comfort zone if for no other reason than she’s asked me to do so. I pointed her to Maymay’s post related to this (is there anything he’s not written about?) and also sent her a couple of Sarah Jameson’s emails that, I think, touch indirectly on it.

Sarah Jameson, for those who don’t know, writes the Male Chastity Blog. She’s a “normal” woman, not unlike Belle, with a husband who likes abnormal things, not unlike me. She writes with confidence and, while I don’t always agree with her, find that she’s right far more often than not (at least IMO). Besides the blog, she also sends out a multi-part email newsletter on the subject of…wait for it…male chastity. […] I recommend it, especially for those just starting out.

First, yay, a relatively new and sensible addition to the orgasm denial/delay/control/what-have-you blogosphere. That is sorely needed. Second, yes, I’m sure there are many topics I’ve not yet written about but I’m working on fixing that. ;)

So, quoting Sarah Jameson, Thumper continues:

…in part 11 of her series, she asks, “Just how long can a man wait?” Her initial response sends an electric shiver down my spine:

Well, the truth is…your man doesn’t have to orgasm ever. As in NEVER.

But then she gives what I think is the best advice I’ve read on the subject:

Over time I’ve come round to the way of thinking that you should keep your man in orgasm denial for at least 50% longer than he asks for and thinks he can stand.

Why?

Because in the early days, while you’re still working out the ground rules, he’ll be basing his own estimation on insufficient knowledge. To HIM, fresh into male chastity, even a week seems like an eternity.

So if he thinks a month, make it six weeks; if he thinks six months, make it nine months; and if he thinks a year…woe betide him.

I think this is a really interesting excerpt because it shows an awareness of the importance of unpredictability, of keeping the orgasm control “game” novel and interesting. Now, Sarah Jameson seems to veer off in the direction of denial period length, which is not unreasonable but is, in my opinion, possibly misleading.

Although it certainly can be an exercise in control to keep a partner orgasm-less for 50% longer than they asked for, that in itself doesn’t reliably provide pleasure. If your measure of “fun” is “longer,” then by all means, go 50% longer. But you could just as easily go 70% longer or, hell, 100% longer, and in my experience, the “pleasure” would be equally unreliable. When you can change the variable and you don’t get a “better” result, then you know you’re missing the core issue.

Moreover, since “pleasure” is different for different people, achieving it doesn’t always boil down to lengths of time, or any other particular activity. Case in point, I spent a lot of time locked up and forbidden to masturbate during my relationship with Eileen, but things are different with Emma. I feel pretty differently about these experiences, but I can’t really say I enjoyed one situation more than the other.

So all of this had me thinking, is there any reliable, measurable way to induce whatever “maximum pleasure” means for me? Although I’m not certain, I did find a hint in this Class Day Lecture given at Stanford University by Robert Sapolsky, a world-renowned primatologist. In it, he discusses the neurobiology behind the feelings of pleasure as associated with reward and anticipation. (Watch the video or read my text transcript, below.)

How we go about reward: now this brings in a little bit of neurobiology, the involvement of a neurotransmitter (a brain chemical messenger) called dopamine. Dopamine is all about reward. You do not want your brain to run out of dopamine, or else you’ll become clinically depressed.

Cocaine works on the dopamine system. All sorts of euphoriants work on dopamine. Dopamine is about reward. At least, that’s what people used to think. And they used to think it would work as follows.

You take a monkey and you’ve trained it in some task. You give it a signal, a light goes on in its room, and that means, ‘Okay, this task is about to begin.’ And the monkey’s learned that if it now does this task, whatever the work is, it will then get a reward after some delay. And what everybody assumed was what dopamine was about was that, once you got that reward, dopamine levels went up. Dopamine was about pleasure, reward, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, all that sort of thing.

Turns out that’s not what dopamine is about. It looks like this instead.

You’ve got this monkey trained to do this task and the signal comes on saying, ‘Okay, we’re starting one of these sessions again,’ and then the dopamine goes up. What is this about? This is not pleasure of getting the reward. This is, ‘I know how this one works, this is great, I’m all on top of this. I know exactly what to do. Piece of cake, I got this under control. I’m on this one.’ It is not about reward, it’s about the anticipation of reward. And in fact, if you block that dopamine rise from occurring, you don’t get the work.

It’s not only about the anticipation of reward, it’s about the goal-directed behavior it is able to fuel.

Very subtle additional piece of this. A wonderful study some years ago where you take this scenario: okay, the individual, the monkey, does the work and, after the delay, gets the reward 100% of the time. Now, instead, in this setting, it gets the reward only 50% of the time. What happens now when that signal comes on, what [the dopamine levels] looks like is this: you switch over to 50% and the dopamine levels explode through the roof there.

What have you just done? You’ve introduced the word “maybe” into your equation, and that is reinforcing like nothing on Earth. That signal comes on, and that monkey is sitting there saying, ‘Piece of cake, I’m on top of this, but I’m such a screwup, and I’m not gonna get it–oh, but today, I’m gonna be on it–but it’s not gonna work out….’ And you just have him teetering there on this fulcrum, and that is pushing dopamine out like there’s no tomorrow.

Just to show that, now instead of the 50% reward rate, give the monkey either a 25% or 75% reward rate. Totally opposite things: this one is bad news, this one’s good news. What’s the one thing they have in common? Both reduce the unpredictability, both lower the dopamine surge to the same extent.

Take a monkey and there’s nothing more addictive out there than the notion that there’s a reward lurking out there and it’s a maybe. And what some of our best social engineers, many of them making a good living in Las Vegas, learn how to do is how to turn what seems like a 50% reality of reward to make it that salient when it’s one tenth of a hundred percent of a chance of reward; how to make one get that dopamine surge and get that goal directed behavior out of there.

So, it turns out that brain chemistry works exactly the same way in [humans]. In us, dopamine is about the anticipation of reward, uncertainty boosts it up further, it drives the work needed for the reward. What’s unique about us, what’s the difference is, the lag time between the work and the reward—how long we can hold on driven by that dopamine surge to pump out that work in order to get the reward.

And we all know this scenario: where you interview really, really well for your preschool, and as a result you get into a good school and a good high school, and you study hard and you get a good GPA and get into a good grad school, get a good job, and eventually you get into the nursing home of your choice. What we’ve got here is this astonishing human capacity to hold on. And, what we have that is completely unprecedented is the ability, in some ideological and some theological systems, to hold on even after you are gone—and a world in which you have a reward that comes in an afterlife. A world in which you are willing to put up with the most egregious of versions of pain in the name of holding on, holding on. A world in which unto the generations after you and the sins upon your children.

There’s nothing like that out there in any other species.

So, beyond the absolutely fascinating sociopolitical implications of this insight into human neurobiology, watching this video some months ago was a light-bulb moment for me. I finally understood the neurochemistry behind one of the most core elements of my sexuality, my fetish for orgasm control. And this knowledge is such good power.

I immediately shared my insight with Emma: dopamine levels are maximized when a “reward” (which is probably a “treat” in our parlance) is acquired exactly 50% of the times when it was expected. This means that, in an ideal world, for every orgasm I’m granted (every time I “do the work for the reward,” whatever the work is in our particular orgasm control game-du-jour), let me actually have that orgasm 50% of the time, in as unpredictable a fashion as possible.

So Sarah’s 50% figure is actually really astute. However, scientifically speaking, the variable is wrong. It’s not about how long one goes without orgasm that (in itself) determines the neurochemical levels of enjoyment one gets from the experience. Instead, it’s more about how reliably a sense of anticipation can be triggered and extended, while maximizing uncertainty of whether or not this time the “reward” (or “treat” or orgasm) is actually forthcoming.

That’s why, with Emma, there’s no longer such a thing as “days when I will orgasm.” Instead, there are only “no” days and “maybe” days. And I gotta say, I really like it this way.

Salt and pepper to taste. Yield: infinity. Serve with loving, desperate need and enjoy. ;)

It’s interesting to note that I was already “the sex blogger that didn’t blog about sex,” at least relatively infrequently and tamely. Nevertheless, I’m even more widely read now (after stopping to talk about the practice of sex) than I ever was before. More interesting, however, is that I’m still asked questions about my personal sexual practices, and asked questions about sex in general, regardless of how much I do or do not talk about what I like to do in the sack.

Recently, I got one such question in an email from someone calling themselves Charybdis:

I like pain, bondage and most of the BDSM culture, but one problem I keep bumping into is that I cannot find a partner who accepts that I do not need, or really want, penetrative vaginal sex. I find a far more intense pleasure moment in other areas of sexual play.

I know what I like and want. But I keep bumping into that wall within the culture that I am supposed to really enjoy his dick inside of me. Will I ever find anyone who understands? Is it alright to be me, as I am, and still be the dominant personality I am, yet not want to be fucked in my vagina?

I have read some (ok, a lot) of your posts, and you seem to really GET how to explain things. I just haven’t read anything where you spoke to this.

—Charybdis

Both the tone and the content of Charybdis’s email resonated with me. It’s frustrating at best and downright depressing at worst to continually feel barred from a full and happy expression of my sexuality thanks to other people’s failure to acknowledge my desires. When Charybdis says they “keep bumping into that wall within the culture,” what I hear is, “I’m frustrated by the systemic suppression of the validity of my sexual desires simply because they do not conform to cultural norms.”

It’s worth calling out the fact that the “culture” being spoken of is, itself, a subculture (the BDSM subculture, specifically), and yet even here, far from the mainstream, there’s cultural pressure to conform to some idealized standard of behavior and desire. Regardless of whether such conformity is required by the mainstream or a subculture, the root of the problem is the same: unquestioned values coupled with disrespect of diversity. While I see nothing inherently wrong with communally-defined idealized standards, I see a lot of things wrong with the ways those standards are perpetuated, ways that needlessly harm people like Charybdis and myself.

So, first, Charybdis, know this: Yes, it is alright to be you, as you are, and still be the dominant personality you are, yet not want to be fucked in your vagina. Second, know that you can fuck with your vagina as easily as you can be fucked in it. And finally, know that while you may not have found people who understand this or who don’t value intercourse highly yet, such people are out there, and they are probably looking for you, too.

Intercourse, which is the word I use to distinguish penis-in-vagina sex from the many other and equally enjoyable kinds of sex I have with partners, is one of the things that’s changed a lot for me over the past two years. Eileen and I did have intercourse, but extremely infrequently by anyone’s measure—maybe once every few months or so? Anyway, it was certainly rare enough that it was especially noteworthy when we did have intercourse. By contrast, intercourse is the sex that Emma and I have most often—intercourse is at least part of almost all of our sexual encounters.

Although I haven’t written much about intercourse specifically, which speaks more to how unimportant the fact of the act is than my interest or lack thereof in it, Eileen has, and I’d encourage you to read through her archives on the subject of sex:

ladies and gentlemen, I am a supposedly “sexually liberated” woman who does not enjoy the act of sexual intercourse. […] I’ve been there, in many different ways with a moderate handful of partners. And I’m here to tell you, it just doesn’t do it for me.

[…]

I would rather curl up in bed with my Hitachi Magic Wand than my achingly eager boyfriend. I’d say it’s a very good thing I ended up with a boy with a fetish for pleasure control.

I don’t doubt that it’s my “fetish for pleasure control” that shaped my rather existential values regarding sexual acts; the act of intercourse isn’t hot for me without a certain intentionality and since that intention can be achieved regardless of a specific sex act, I have no worldly reason to find having my cock inside a partner’s cunt particularly important. Sure, it feels wonderful, but so do many other things. I kink much harder on being sexually controlled in novel and psychologically intimate ways than I do on simple intercourse.

Indeed, the only strong motivation I can remember feeling for intercourse is derived from my partner’s desire for the act itself. Enjoying particular sex acts for the acts themselves very often boils down to sexual compersion, for me. Such is undoubtedly the case with Emma.

When Emma and I have intercourse, we do so because she wants that, specifically. So clear is the distinction between her desire for the act and my desire to pleasure her through the act that intercourse, for us, often revolves around an explicit and intentional challenge in which my sole purpose is to pleasure her with my cock (often to the exclusion of my own orgasm, because then the power differential is even more pronounced). During these scenes, which rarely involve restraints or any other traditional symbols of the BDSM subculture, I’m not a man wanting sex but rather a mindful and sophisticated pleasure toy that’s been “turned on” for her use.

While the sex I had with Eileen is stunningly different from the sex I have with Emma, my intentionality has not changed. I was Eileen’s toy. Then (and, happily, now) I was Emma’s. Eileen had her personal motivations. Emma has her own, different set.

When sex is amazing, it is never because of a sublimation of desires on anyone’s part, but rather an alignment of individual self-interest and fulfillment. For many men, intercourse has specific meaning, value, and importance. For me, it doesn’t. I’m no more or less a man than the men who desire intercourse, and neither Eileen, Emma, nor Charybdis is any more or less (presumably) women than other women with different desires than theirs.

This interesting image via SlaveBoy.Tumblr.com.

One of the things that has seriously bugged me for a very long time is how lots of people think about submissiveness, particularly but not necessarily as it relates to male sexuality. It bugs me because for all the lip service paid to respecting submission, very little about the way it’s discussed actually seems to be respectful of submissive desires.

I, unlike many submissive young men in their teens, surrounded myself with the culture and ritual of dominant/submissive relationships through the very fortunate circumstances in which I found myself. Yet, despite my incredible access to such resources, it was indescribably difficult (not to mention painful) for me to get to a point where I felt like I can enjoy my sexual submission as a valid part of my masculinity.

Why was it so hard for to me feel validated in my submission? Why does it continue to be a struggle for many people, as the overwhelming response to my subversive writings at MaleSubmissionArt.com show? This question, at once both simple and unspeakably intricate, is what I want to address in this post.

Imagine for a moment you’re a young guy (or a guy of any age, really) trying to understand your sexual desires. You know you want a relationship with (in the name of simplicity) a woman who will “take charge in the bedroom,” but you don’t really know what that looks like. You come across porn and sex blogs and, like a second (or third, or fourth) erotic awakening, all sorts of fantasy imagery involving either getting butt-fucked or not being allowed to orgasm, or both of those, starts bubbling in your brain, since—let’s face it—that’s most of the erotic material out there for such guys. You finally get a girlfriend and, remarkably, she’s good, giving and game, so you get butt-fucked and she doesn’t let you come. “Wonderful,” you’re likely to think, “now I’ve been submissive.”

If you’re lucky, maybe it was really wonderful. More power to you. But what if it’s not? Moreover, and I suspect this is most common, what if that wonderfulness is just the tip of the iceberg? What if the new experience was amazing and novel but you want more? What is that “more” that you want? More butt-fucking? More bondage? More sexual service? More orgasm denial? What are you yearning for, really?

This, sadly, is where many of us get stuck. I’ve read countless words from hundreds if not thousands of men, all of whom seem to be trying to answer these very questions. I’m one of these men, trying to figure out what the fuck all this desiring is, trying to make it “more” and “better” as though I’m following some kind of primal programming. I want to be more passionate. More intimate. More connected. More devoted. More focused. More meaningful. More submissive.

Obviously, this is a very big topic, and I often feel overwhelmed just thinking about how submission relates to my life, influences my relationships, or shapes my desires. As I often struggle with articulating these thoughts, I figured that even if I don’t get it quite right, it’s worth sharing some of where I’ve gotten to because I no longer enjoy sex despite being a submissive man. I finally enjoy sex because I am—and want to be—a sexually submissive man.

Hopefully, I’ll clarify the imprecise language we currently have available to explore gendered power and submissive masculinity in particular, and I’ll address how such feeble language may cause egregious ambiguity in communication as well as misconceptions about fundamental desires that hamper our understanding of consensual sexual submission.

Hot or not? Submission isn’t arousal.

This submission stuff is hard, and I’m not the only one who’s struggled, or is struggling, with it. One reason it’s so goddamn hard is because the way I so often see it conceptualized feels polluted by imprecision, absolutism, and sexism.

Most of the time, I ignore a great deal of the polluted chatter because it comes from people I don’t hold in high regard to begin with. Recently, however, some of the men who blog that I respect a lot have hit some of the same notes while singing submissive masculinity’s tunes as the people I ignore, and that is something I cannot ignore.

More specifically, Thumper, whose blog I read almost religiously, inspired a debate between MyKey and myself. In a comment on one of Thumper’s posts, MyKey said:

The denial after [lots of orgasms] is much harder and much sweeter for it, and the submission deeper and more fun. Of course during those periods [after orgasm] its hard to be as submissive[…].

Although I’ve read this opinion expressed in about a bazillion different ways, it’s a sentiment I’ve never felt completely comfortable with. Indeed, the more I dissect my own submissiveness and explore what submission means to me, the more upset I get by its prevalence. I get even more upset when bloggers perpetuate this, because they are currently the most influential source of education about submissive masculinity.

But before I get too far into what I find so upsetting about the way this is framed, let’s make one thing clear: what I’m about to say has nothing to do with espousing a submissive ideology, a One True Way® for being a “real submissive.” It’s irrational to, for instance, call a self-identified switch “a submissive” when that person is feeling submissive by sole virtue of their feelings; they are no more or less “a submissive” than they say they are, despite how desirous of submissive feelings they are at any given time. Insofar as identity politics are involved, they stop at the point of acknowledging that your identity is a part in your personal experience of the world.

This post, however, is not about your experience of the world. It’s about finding a way to convey your experience in a manner that is reconcilable with the different experiences of others. This is important because, lacking this ability, all conversation about submission starts with “for me,” repeats the caveat, and then ends with “Your Mileage May Vary.” To date, every way I’ve heard anyone talk about submission breaks down when someone else introduces their own, differing, experience, and I’m afraid those conversations are no longer useful for me.

Anyway, the short debate between MyKey and I ultimately lead to a post in which Thumper put forth the following equation:

Denial + arousal = submission.

In the comments—worth reading despite veering into predictably unhelpful tangents at points—Thumper later amended this to read Denial + arousal = submissive energy. That’s better, thanks in part to the focus on “energy” (I think more precisely termed desire) over the intrinsic nature of the outcome. Nevertheless, I want to challenge both statements because I think the premise underlying them is simply not true.

Both statements feed into a dangerous, wide-spread stereotype: the cock-centric notion that if you control a man’s penis, you control the man. Is that true? Of course it’s not. These activities could certainly be an expression of dominance or submission and they might trigger dominant or submissive feelings in oneself or one’s partner(s), but Thumper, MyKey and I already seem to agree that the acts are not, themselves, the root cause of submission or dominance.

To wit, and to Thumper’s credit, one of his next sentences is the following:

That’s not saying I’m in no way submissive when my sexual appetite has been totally sated. I think I would be accepting of domination even then. [And later, in the comments:] I wasn’t trying to suggest it’s just that simple […] but they are strongly related.

Indeed, I can think of no realm less suited to the beautiful simplicity of mathematics than human desire, so it’s obvious that Thumper’s equation is an oversimplification. Since we can all see that things are not “just that simple,” I presume that what Thumper, MyKey, and other submissive men perpetuating this simplistic formulation are trying to get at is that they feel submissive more acutely when the fact of their orgasm denial is at the fore of their thoughts. Thumper says he feels his “sub mojo” lessen after he has come. MyKey calls this sensation “sub drop” and, since I disagree with the premise of their statements, questions whether I’m “wired differently”.

At least in this regard, however, I am not wired differently. I do understand the sudden, often startling change in desires post-orgasm. During relationships with keyholders, the degree with which my interest in, say, getting my penis locked away waned after having an orgasm was (and still is) totally remarkable to me. Nevertheless, similar to the experiences of others, when my keyholder wanted me locked, I got locked. Why? Because that’s hot! It wasn’t quite as hot right then, but it was super-hot shortly thereafter, when I was once again unable to masturbate freely.

This simple after-the-fact observation points to a crucial distinction I fear is missing from the conversation about submission: just because an activity is less pleasant at some moments than it is during others doesn’t mean I won’t do or enjoy those activities. Moreover, the drive to perform those activities independent of one’s immediate motivations is a distinct, separate pleasure, from the pleasure one gets from desiring the activity directly.

I think Tom Allen illustrated this in the sexiest way ever in his erotic story, Ahead of Time. Portions of this story are so apropos to this discussion that I just have to quote it:

“And I want you to come really hard for me. I want you to remember this for a long time.”

“Oooh,” I moaned aloud.

“That’s why I’m going to make you eat my pussy right after you come.”

I gasped. It was like an electric shock to my groin. I’ve long had this fantasy, but could never bring myself to do it. The idea of being forced to clean her, to lick my still-hot come from her, to hear her demanding that I make her clean, to make her come with my tongue… I’ve only mentioned to her a handful of times over the years, but I’ve never been able to ask for this, let alone to try it. She was right, there’s something about the first ten or fifteen minutes after coming that puts all that desire right out of my head. I was excited, but at the same time a bit fearful. I knew that I wouldn’t want to do it afterward…and so did she.

She sensed my hesitation. “I know the idea turns you on,” she said.

Thinking fast, I said “But, I, um, thought that you were satisfied. You told me that you had come enough for tonight.”

“Oh, you’re not going to do it for my pleasure,” she said, “at least, not for my sexual pleasure. You’re going to do it because in a few days, you’re going to think about it, and you’re going to remember this evening as the hottest thing we’ve ever done.”

[…]

I was still partially dazed as she inched her knees alongside my body. When she finally rested her legs over my arms and braced her other hand against the headboard, though, things…changed somehow. Her pussy, which just minutes ago was a beautiful, warm cave, suddenly now seemed like a hairy tube of flesh that was filled with something that I didn’t want. Ugh, how could I ever have asked for this? I pursed my lips, but it was too late—I felt the drips onto my cheeks and chin. Seconds later, her slick lips were pressed tightly against my mouth, and I could hear her encouraging me to clean her, to keep sucking and licking until everything was gone.

(Emphasis mine.)

What Tom’s story and our many similar experiences show us is that not even the men who purport to quantify submission based on sexual arousal or orgasm denial actually do that. Although our awareness of submissive feelings may be intensified by specific, often fetishistic triggers (e.g., being horny and prevented from coming), those two concepts are not causally related.

For men like Thumper and I, who clearly dig orgasm denial pretty hard, it makes sense that this desire is a core aspect of how we want to fuck. But we do ourselves and our readers a terrible disservice by perpetuating the idea that our fetish is the cause of our submissive desire rather than a manifestation of it. Submission does not come about through someone else’s control—that is mere restriction in the best case, and abuse in the worst case—it comes about through our active desire to submit. Consensual submission is not about how someone else controls me, it’s about the opportunities I create for myself to be vulnerable to that person.

When I hear people discussing submission as though it is the result of the thing they want instead of discussing submission itself as the thing they want, it’s like listening to people talk while putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Such an awkward conceptualization of submission is not merely incorrect, it’s very dangerous because it restricts any submissive desire into a necessarily coercive paradigm.

In this instance, with teasing and denial as the addends, it constructs mens’ submission as totally dependent on the myth of male lust (the idea that men are controlled by their penises because they are men). It states that submissive energy is itself induced by a woman (or, more generally, “keyholder”) by accessing that man’s sexual potency in a strictly prescribed, time-release fashion, like a pill.

This is the same misconception that says blowjobs are inherently submissive, or that pain is inherently bad, or even that blogging about sex is inherently submissive (srsly)! Sadly, these ideas are the prevailing view of what “submission” is, and I think they totally miss the point about the validity of submission itself as a core motivation.

Framing submission as a second-class thing, a byproduct of some other, first-class particle, is incorrect. Submission is it’s own distinct facet of sexual desire.

Reductionist Submission Is Dangerous To Your Sex Life

There’s absolutely nothing wrong about getting off on stereotypes. While the reasons for why many submissive men, including myself, fetishize orgasm denial are debatable, that obvious fact does not make orgasm denial a component of submission. Akin to the way desiring anal sex does not make someone gay, abstaining from orgasm does not make someone a submissive. Abstaining longer doesn’t make them “more submissive.”

Sexual “teasing” is really pleasurable and fun for many people, regardless of their interest in submission. For a huge population, that kind of sex is all about improving their orgasms, whether “vanilla” or not; I’ve read of self-identified dominant men who enjoy the practice, too. For other people, like certain religious sects, some portions of asexual populations, and anorgasmic women, living (or trying to live) an orgasm-less existence isn’t even kinky. On the flip side, there are certainly some submissive men who simply aren’t into orgasm denial at all.

In other words, even though sex acts obviously influence one’s mental or physical state at any given moment, conceptually coupling a sexual activity to what an activity means is going to cut you off from the pleasure of diverse sexual experience. Teasing and denial (the “denial+arousal” part of Thumper’s equation) are not ingredients for submission, they’re just toys I play with because I, like many others, enjoy expressing submission with them some of the time. Sometimes we enjoy it more than other times, but sometimes we express that same submission in completely unrelated ways.

Regardless of your personal experience, I’d urge you to avoid linking any sex act to any intention, even “for you,” even if it’s your fetish. The stereotypical view of orgasm denial as requisite for or even directly “enhancing” submission, even for those of us who fetishize it, simply doesn’t account for our own diverse expressions of submission. To assert that it does is fundamentally miscommunicative. It’d be like saying getting flogged is submission and that the harder you get flogged the more submissive you are, and although people often make the “harder=submissivier” false assertion as well, that doesn’t make it sensible, that makes it dangerous!

That definition of submission, coercive at best and abusive at worst, invalidates submission itself as a potential motivation for healthy sex by undermining a submissive person’s power to choose exactly what they do or do not want—a power that’s required to make healthy sexual choices for one’s self, even “as a submissive.” It tricks us into believing all the false dichotomies embedded in hegemonic culture that tell us BDSM is obscene, and that to be submissive is to necessarily be unassertive, passive, self-effacing, receptive, or acquiescent. These are not ambiguous, wishy-washy obstacles to people’s health. For many people, particularly men who are deeply immersed in heteronormative culture, these are real factors that contribute to sexual anxiety and a horrible depreciation of self-image.

Defining the degree of one’s sexual submission as the summation of a period of orgasm denial and current sexual arousal is not only reductionist, I believe it’s actively damaging. The equation perpetuates the myth of male lust and disavows the validity of submission as a sexual self-expression that can be actively chosen, rather than induced coercively.

In the post that spawned all this theorizing, Thumper wrote:

I had cruised all through my adolescence with no inkling I was what I was (though I can see some signs that were there all along).

Like Thumper, I was certainly submissive before I had a dominant partner in my life. So while this rant may sound like meaningless semantics to some, it’s crucial that we amplify these distinctions and move the prevailing understanding of submissive masculinity away from the limiting, misrepresentative, and downright sexist bullshit so often spewed by exploitative pro-dommes and the likes of Elise Sutton (no link because I hate what she says; Google it instead actually, Gloria Brame’s essay on Elise Sutton is totally worth reading). That’s precisely the kind of bullshit that kept “what we are” hidden from men like Thumper and I for so long.

As an adamantly submissive man myself, I’m sure my personal experience is going to be different from, say, a switch’s orgasm denial experience. And that’s the point: submission is not about creating a ruleset of Things To Do To Be Submissive for anyone, yourself least of all. Very simply, it’s about sexual self-expression in order to be happy and healthy.

So please, all of us who blog about such things, stop insisting that keeping a man from his orgasms somehow turns him more submissive. You’re just fooling yourselves, your readers, and arguably worst of all, your lovers.

I was asked to write an essay for Furry Girl‘s latest independent porn site, Cocksexual.com. Unlike most porn sites, whose mere descriptions turn me right the fuck off, when Furry Girl described her vision of Cocksexual, I was actually intrigued. On the homepage, she calls it, pansexual porn featuring hot models of all orientations and genders. Here, you’ll find none of those tacky “lesbian” scenes with discount-bin strapons, or the cliché Mistress Fetishqueen fucking her worthless male submissive. Now that, I thought, I could get behind. Or in front of, depending.

So when Furry Girl asked me to write a piece for the launch of her site, I didn’t have any trouble and what I came up with was a touch more personal than even I was prepared for. Here’s an excerpt from my essay on Cocksexual.com:

When I first tentatively explored anal sex, which I began doing in the shower using the handle of a discarded toothbrush, I thought what I wanted was the woman’s role, passive and receptive. At that age, surrounded as I was by the false hegemonic view of penetration as being the same as masculinity, what else could I think? Maybe I was really a woman, because if being a man meant a distaste for anal pleasure, then I certainly wasn’t one of those.

But as the years went by I discovered, to my admitted surprise, that I’m not a woman. I’m a man. One’s gender identity, such as man or woman, and the enjoyment one gets from a particular sexual activity, such as penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse or strap-on sex, are in no way directly correlated. So too are sexual orientation and enjoying anal sex distinct from one another. I’ve had anal sex with both men and women, but I’ve so far enjoyed being penetrated by the women a lot more. For me, a big part of the fun is seeing their enthusiasm.

You should check out the full essay over on Furry Girl’s site. There’s also a really detailed, really personable article by Thomas Roche, and another by Essin Em. It’s pretty neat to find myself in the company of such well-known writers.

Finally, I made some money writing that essay and I’m now looking for paid writing gigs that align with my worldview and message, as this one did. The feeling of getting financially supported—rather than financially “compensated”—for sharing an intimate part of myself in writing is absolutely wonderful. I sincerely hope I can find or make more opportunities to do it again.

Thanks for the first opportunity, Furry Girl, and good luck with Cocksexual.com. I hope it shows more people, especially more men, that they can enjoy strap-on sex without the stigmas so many other pornographers drown it in.