Friday, March 19, 2010

Community Organizing for Great Justice!

Category labels: Community, Kink events, Technology, Vanilla life

Last night, I gave a 5 minute “lightning talk” at the monthly 5 Minutes of Fame event at Noisebridge, a local San Francisco hackerspace in the Mission. Noisebridge is only a few minutes walk from the venue for this Sunday’s KinkForAll San Francisco, the Women’s Building, so I took the opportunity to share a little bit about how KinkForAll got to where it is today. Unfortunately, video of my talk is currently unavailable, so I recorded my own voiceover to the slideshow I presented and would like to share it with you now.


Community Organizing for Great Justice! – Five Minutes of Fame, March 2010

It’s incredibly difficult to condense a lot of information into a five minute talk! Although this recording clocked in at 5 minutes and 42 seconds, somehow I managed to clock my talk at Noisebridge in several seconds under the 5 minute time limit.

In addition to the video, below is a transcript of my presenter notes so you can follow along.

Hi! My name is ‘maymay’ and this is my second time at 5 Minutes of Fame, so thanks for having me back. :) By day, I’m a web developer. By night, I’m a sexual freedom community organizer. All told, I’m kind of a “social justice technologist,” and my talk is called “Community Organizing for Great Justice!”

My story begins in 430 BC when my buddy Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian, observed:

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

I think it’s really unfair for the world to work that way. I didn’t know what to do about that until 2009, when Mark Zuckerburg, the creator of Facebook, announced that if Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world.

Whereas even Greek gods had to ask Hermes to deliver messages for them, you and I can reach a global audience with the push of a button. Thus, “doing right” (as the world goes) should be possible pretty quickly.

I figured I’d try this social media for social justice thing out myself by starting to organize free, all-ages conferences called “KinkForAll unconferences.” Each was designed to inspire a local community to have documented conversations about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life. Within a year, event participants had put on 5 full-day unconferences in 4 cities across New England, attracting hundreds of in-person participants and thousands more online. 4 more are planned for the Spring and Summer across America, including the next one this Sunday at the Women’s Building here in San Francisco. (You should come.)

So it turns out that spreading ideas on the Internet actually can effect real-world events. Moreover, organizing a community around a passion or an idea that you have isn’t actually all that hard. I want to show you how to do that.

Start with having a vision of a better world. This is really a fake step because every one of you already has this. Whenever you get annoyed by how boring, wasteful, or unfair something is, you’re envisioning a better world.

Take that vision and make it a really specific goal. Mine is empowering every person on Earth to claim their sexual rights and freedoms.

Consider giving your vision a name. Make it unique enough to show up in Google searches while still symbolizing your goal. I find sticking multiple words together works well. Names can say a lot about goals, leadership styles, and the community you’ll build. Choose one thoughtfully because it’s going to represent you for better or worse.

Next, start working towards your vision in public. When you do your work in public, you immunize yourself against distrust. It also becomes easier for people to work with you because they can see every step you take; you make it easy for people to mimic you and you end up leading by example by fiat. This is particularly important for novel ideas or innovations in a particular field.

This kind of transparency was central to KinkForAll’s success. All organization happens on a public mailing list, allowing anyone to read how an event got put together, even if they’re not part of the group. At the same time, the mailing list provides a sort of pseudo-documentation so we have a way to transfer knowledge to other people without a human gatekeeper.

The mailing list works well for what it does because email is a fairly ubiquitous technology. You can’t bring people on board unless they can collaborate with you, so don’t require the use of tools they can’t access or don’t understand.

In a social movement, people are like the pages on the Web; your job is to build links that connect individuals in a meaningful way. If you act as the glue between knowledgeable experts, all you’ll have to know is how to find out the answers to questions. You don’t need to have all the answers yourself.

Also like the Web itself, build community using “small pieces loosely joined.” Don’t get hung up on infrastructure requirements. Instead, use the tools already available to you.

To distribute KinkForAll talks, participants uploaded media to their own blogs as well as any number of hosted service providers. Each upload is marked with a global “KinkForAll” tag as well as an event-specific tag, creating a distributed yet well-organized library. Using multiple cyber-venues not only reaches more people, it also makes controversial messages harder to censor.

Reaching people through online social networks is especially helpful because using them can help you overcome discrimination. The pseudonymous Internet gives us the fantastic ability to collaborate with others based solely on the merit of their contributions, literally blinding us to skin color, age, gender, or other characteristics.

Use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to approach people you think might help you—especially ones you don’t already know. Don’t “market” to these people. Instead, engage them as leaders of their own social circle so they become your ambassadors to their own communities. Then invite them to convene with fellow participants in a shared space, like a mailing list.

But don’t rely on the Internet alone. Have at least an occasional real-world presence so people have an opportunity to connect face-to-face.

Having both real-world and cyber venues is also one way to invite different levels of participation. Rather than controlling what people do with rigid roles, let people gravitate towards the tasks that interest them. Your job as leader isn’t to tell people what to do, but rather to make the things that need doing obvious.

When someone signs up to participate in a KinkForAll event, for instance, they automatically gain visibility to the event’s list of logistical needs. When someone makes a change to the needs list, everyone who signed up gets an email notification alerting them to the newly needed item, thus giving them an opportunity to bring it to the event and building participation directly into the process.

Regardless of your vision, it’s likely the first thing you’ll encounter is other people telling you “no,” and reasoning about why you can’t or shouldn’t be allowed to do what you’re doing. Dave Winer calls this “stop energy,” and it’s deadly to ideas.

As a general rule of thumb, the more stop energy you encounter from people who represent the status quo, the more you know you’re on the right track! Don’t let it distract you. Once you can see your vision, never stray from it, even if it takes a while for other people to see it, too.

Don’t change your vision; let your audience find you. As my buddy Thucydides said,

The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, both glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, they go out and they meet it.

So have a vision, share it with others, and then go out and see it through. And of course, to learn more, come to KinkForAll San Francisco this Sunday morning at the Women’s Building, or visit KinkForAll.org!

Thank you very much!

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Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Open Thread: When Educators Are Censors

Category labels: Personal experience, Politics of sex, Vanilla life

Earlier this month, I was forced to deal with a frightening attack on my personal integrity and one of my sex-positivity projects. Thankfully, no serious damage to anyone or anything was done, but the attack helped me see that these experiences have now become a pattern. In other words, as it’s already happened several times over the course of the last year, I realize they’re probably not going to stop soon.

It’s no surprise, really. I’ve gone through an incredible transformation from a disgruntled youth to what I believe I can safely describe as a sexual freedom community organizer this year. Merging my passions for technology and sexual freedom has meant I’ve become a spokesperson for the intersection of tech and sex, founding KinkForAll put me at odds with some of the more traditional sexuality community leaders, and the louder I get and the more I do with media projects like Kink On Tap and SexEdEverywhere, the more obvious a target for opposition I become.

This change has provided some invaluable experiences from which I’ve learned a lot. However, not all of these lessons have been fun, or easy. Some of them, like what happened a few weeks ago, have been downright enraging, deeply hurtful, and very scary.

Now, I could get upset about attacks on me and my work (and I did, especially since the nastiest ones came from people who call themselves educators), but I could also see opposition to what I do as a sort of unsolicited advice. Detractors can help me figure out what more I need to do to make the world a better place. Some of the people holding uninformed beliefs that I’m recklessly endangering people’s lives rather than improving them are the very ones I need to find a way to reach more than any other group.

And that brings me to my question for all of you:

In your attempts to share knowledge, how do you deal with certified educators who try to prevent you from speaking up, who want to silence your voice? What do you do if you disagree with them about what education itself means?

This is the question that’s been challenging me for weeks now. Despite mulling it over in my head, I haven’t come up with answers. I have, however, learned some lessons about what to do in tough situations that I’d like to share with you now. In so doing, I hope to start a conversation with you and the wider education community about educators and education itself, particularly education about controversial topics like sex, because I think this is a conversation that needs to be had and from which I can learn a lot.

1. Don’t let “stop energy” distract you from your work.

Time and again, the first thing I hear when I propose an idea to a group of people is the word “no.” It’s like an omnipotent monster, always there everywhere you go, never backing down. This monster can also come in the form of “can’t,” “don’t,” and perhaps most tellingly, “shouldn’t.” All of these are the same: a form of opposition that Dave Winer calls stop energy. Dave describes stop energy as reasons why [one] can’t or shouldn’t be allowed to do what [one] proposes.

Sometimes stop energy is unintentional, coming from friends who want to help you avoid pitfalls but fail to express themselves supportively. Other times, stop energy can be dangerous, coming from people who will actively try to prevent you from accomplishing your goal. In my experience, these are often people who feel threatened by you or your work because you’re changing the status quo in some way. These are also the people most likely to viciously criticize and undermine you in any number of subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

As I mentioned in my KinkForAll Providence presentation,

For those that don’t know, when Sara Eileen and I co-founded KinkForAll, we took some very heavy criticism from people who believed that the essentially open and public nature of KinkForAll events were “recklessly endangering” participants, that we would be “outing” people. I believe this criticism was spawned from a belief in [a] false dichotomy: that to be public is to be out, that in order to have adequate privacy, people of sexuality minorities must be closeted.

Most often, however, stop energy can simply be distracting. The larger the group you’re speaking to, the more distracting stop energy you’re likely to encounter. Like waves in a giant pool, I encountered torrents of this form of stop energy when I started MaleSubmissionArt.com from people who were disapproving of my use of imagery I didn’t know the source of, who questioned the need for the site’s existence, or who simply didn’t understand my goal. If I had taken the time to respond to most of these people, the site would never have survived because all my time would’ve been sucked up by the distraction they created.

Stop energy is deadly to projects and ideas. Regardless of whether it is active opposition or simply a passive decoy, I learned that you must absolutely never let negative attention keep you from doing your work. You must constantly, consistently, relentlessly keep pushing forward. Stop for just a moment before you reach your tipping point—a kind of stop energy escape velocity, if you will—and your success is in question.

2. Win-win is more possible than you think; never settle.

I don’t believe in compromise, in splitting the difference, or in zero-sum games. That doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore people or force my will on others. What it means is that given two diametrically opposed resolutions to a problem, I always seek a third option.

Sometimes finding win-win situations involves changing the rules of the game. Despite what many people might say, changing the rules of the game is okay because if you prioritize a system’s bureaucracy over the value it was (ostensibly) intended to provide, you’ll lock yourself into a cage called stagnation. Giving in to a compromise is the antithesis of win-win situations (scenarios in which everyone benefits and no one’s desires are sacrificed) and, I promise you, win-win situations are more possible than you think.

Case in point, despite the stop energy people threw at me for MaleSubmissionArt.com about its use of images, many artists whose work I feature are very happy to have their photographs displayed on the site. What I find horribly ignorant is not the desire of some artists to protect their work by restricting who can republish it, but the notion that because they don’t want to participate in the site, they have some right to prevent me from involving others. That’s the kind of approach guaranteed to preclude even the possibility of a win-win situation from emerging, and that’s just bad for everyone.

For a more personal example, in the two months or so since I quit my day job, I was able to find a new job that takes up less of my time. When I quit my day job, I wrote:

I’m not willing to merely survive, because I demand excellence and happiness. I demand it of myself, and so I demand it of you. […] I believe there is more value in doing, being, and getting what I want than in sacrificing it. I believe that there is more richness in the world than can be measured with all the world’s riches.

If I was ever willing to compromise the full realization of my dreams, I would never have been able to make the opportunities I have now.

3. Engage opponents in constructive dialogue.

Sadly, despite your best intentions, some people are just going to dig their heels in and fight against everything you do. At KinkForAll Providence, Megan Andelloux gave a talk called Sex Panic in Pawtucket where she discussed her experience dealing with just such a situation:

When Megan Andelloux wanted to open The Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health in Pawtucket, RI, “freaked out” residents barricaded her opening for 5 months and the local police threatened to arrest her. At KinkForAll Providence, 1 week after Megan’s education center opened, she gives a talk about the “sex panic” that swept the state and captured national headlines. Megan tells of a University of Rhode Island professor who waged a “war” to stop her from educating adults about sex, how locals demanded that “we should outlaw sex!” and how she fought for your sexual freedoms—and won!

(Emphasis mine.)

Megan’s talk is well worth listening to, but what I found most interesting about it is that she had to fight back against educators who were trying to stop efforts to educate. This is interesting because the slanderous attacks against me have often come from educators, too.

In one case, the person in question runs classes about various sexuality topics and accused me of attempting to get KinkForAll attendees registered as sex offenders because of my insistence that the unconferences place no age-based restriction on who can participate. In another case, the person is a professor at a university (much like Megan’s experience), who tried to stop KinkForAll events by trying to build a case to show how I’m supposedly intentionally crafting dangerous environments and luring young people there, among other things.

I think these people are afraid. So afraid, I think, that they let paranoia overcome their reason. I think educators more than any other group should be people who empower, not censor. As I said during my presentation at KinkForAll Washington DC:

If you truly want to protect our children from sexual abuse, then education is far and away the best protection you can give them. And yet, sadly, even in otherwise unbiased communities, many people are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that young people might want to participate, almost always citing fears that access to sexuality information could be traumatic. Tragically, projecting such sexual paranoia onto young people is actually killing many of them.

[…]

Sadly, because of the social constructions of power with which sex and age are so inextricably intertwined, the people in power—the adults—often choose censorship to restrict the availability of sexuality information to young people instead of education, all under the guise of protection. But censorship and oppressive information restrictions are not protection, only education is.

In these and other instances, attempting to engage constructively with these individuals has proven enormously difficult. In one case, I was forced to disengage when I realized that the discussion itself was a stalling tactic; the person in question was determined to turn any engagement whatsoever into pure stop energy. In other cases, people refused to engage me directly and instead went behind my back in order to sabotage my work and the work of my collaborators by making outrageous and slanderous claims about us and our intentions.

Thankfully, these sorts of people have a fundamental weakness: they don’t listen. In one case, the person in question actually used my own words about education’s importance (the ones I quoted above, in fact) in order to attempt to convince others that I was trying not to educate. Nonsensical, I know, but that’s how twisted these people’s perceptions of me are.

After KinkForAll Washington DC was ousted from our original venue, we were concerned that the negative press it got would mean detractors would show up to the unconference itself. We were concerned about the same thing at KinkForAll Providence. That didn’t happen, but what if it did? What could we do?

As part of the public discussion about the concerns, “Chris!” made the suggestion on the KinkForAll mailing list that we could actually invite these people to voice their opinions in the same manner that we are voicing ours: by encouraging them to lead a session at KinkForAll! I think this could be exactly the right move.

This doesn’t merely sound diplomatic and effective as a show of integrity if not actual discussion. (I don’t know if any people who might show up as protesters to a KinkForAll would actually take us up on such an offer.) More than that, I think it would engage the opposition in the very process of constructive conversation they wish to destroy. Because, as I’m beginning to realize more and more, opposition is not inherently incorrect, nor is it inherently less informed (although it certainly is less informed relatively often).

Opposition is just that: difference. And difference is required for the very thing I want to promote: diversity. Because diversity is unity.

What opposition doesn’t have to be is violent, restrictive, or oppressive. It doesn’t have to impinge on anyone’s rights or freedoms. There can be opposition to a thing and that thing can still harmlessly exist at the same time. That’s the kind of opposition I have to church groups, for instance. I’m certainly not interested in going to any, but I don’t feel any compulsion to stop them from meeting in public places or from letting them pray in those places or in private.

Live and let live—freely, diversely, and without restriction. Again, quoting from my KinkForAll Washington DC presentation:

The more afraid we are, the more arbitrary rules—like age-based oversimplifications—we try to impose on each other. That’s not a solution—that’s unacceptable.

I think people who oppose education oppose humanity itself. Our innate human drive to learn, to know things we didn’t know before, to explore the strange, new worlds of uncertainty is among the most fundamental parts of our existence. It’s the driving force behind the pursuit of happiness. Because if knowledge is power, learning is self-empowerment. In fact, the root of the word educate is educe, a word that means “to draw out potential.”

To me, it seems treasonous to our species that educators like the ones who attacked Megan Andelloux would so unashamedly oppose others’ attempts to educate. Since I can’t fathom why anyone would want to do that, I want to learn more about what these and other people are thinking.

And if you’re someone who’s attacked me in the past, I also invite your comments, especially if you’re one of the people who have previously avoided speaking with me directly. Now’s your chance; I don’t like you right now, but I’m willing to hear you out and learn from you.

What strategies have you used to protect yourself or resolve attacks on your work, your personal life, and your friends from people who are in positions of authority, especially traditional educators? I’m looking forward to hearing about your thoughts and learning from your lessons. Thank you.

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Friday, February 19, 2010

Announcing Sex Education Everywhere: Because We Learn More Than What They Teach

Category labels: Myths and misconceptions, Vanilla life

Vote for me!I’m very excited to announce a new initiative that I’ve begun working on in collaboration with Emma, co-unorganizer of KinkForAll Providence and my co-host on Kink On Tap. The new project, called SexEdEverywhere, is going to be our biggest and most challenging project to date. It also has enormous potential.

The core of the project is a sexual health education and empowerment video campaign highlighting the reality that we learn about sex from disparate sources in many locations. I believe that the time has come for people to realize that “sex education” is not, has never been, and never should be confined to health class. I believe that young people, sexuality minorities, and certain other disenfranchised groups (still including, sadly, women) have an enormously important role to play in reforming the empty-vessel, top-down model of education and turning it into a peer-to-peer meritocracy where accurate information wins out over misinformation because it saves lives rather than being politically expedient.

And I believe that this change is only possible when it comes from the very people who need such change most: young men, women, and other people like you and me.

That’s why Emma and I have put together a proposal for the project and submitted it to the International Women’s Health Coalition Young Visionaries contest, a contest that, if we win, would seed our project with $1000 USD of necessary funding to get it off the ground. Part of the criteria for winning the contest is based on popular vote, which means I need your votes to win.

If this sounds like a project worth supporting, please go to the Sex Ed Everywhere IWHC voting page and click on “Vote” right next to our picture. And then come back and vote again the next day, and every dayI’ve been informed that the contest rules have changed after I posted this entry; you can only vote once per IP address. What that means is that you should go vote, and then you should encourage your friends to vote from their homes or offices. Helping to spread the word until voting ends on March 25, which I understand is totally fair for the competition!

Here is an excerpt of our proposal for the IWHC Young Visionaries contest:

With the $1000 grant from the IWHC Young Visionaries contest we will fund a sexual health education and empowerment video campaign that highlights the reality that we learn about sex from disparate sources in many locations. The heart of this campaign, which we call SexEdEverywhere (“SEE”), will begin with a competition calling for submissions of 30 to 90 second videos that will be reviewed and featured on a network of 5 (or more) microsites over time. The campaign will be based at SexEdEverywhere.com, a website that will actively engage the people to whom it will speak: women and youth across the globe.

[…]

Our vision of lasting change is to create a world in which accurate information about sexual health and freedoms reaches more students and young people than suffer from misinformation or a knowledge deficit. By engaging young people in the creation and distribution of knowledge, we hope to help them recognize their power to enact social justice in their local communities. This would be a world in which women and young people are aware of their sexual and reproductive rights from an early age, and are empowered to make informed decisions for themselves and educate those around them.

Please vote for SexEdEverywhere and help every person on Earth SEE a world where we are all aware of our sexual and reproductive rights! Thank you for your daily voting support!

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Monday, February 8, 2010

On Dichotomies that (No Longer) Jail Me – KinkForAll Providence

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Communication, D/s dynamics, Kink events, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Myths and misconceptions, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Vanilla life

This past Saturday, KinkForAll Providence was hosted at Brown University and sponsored by the Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council (SHEEC), chaired by undergraduate student Aida Manduley. I had an awesome time. The unconference sparked fantastically interesting and very important conversations, including discussions about the approach different cultures have to sex and sexuality (notably traditional Mexican and Puerto Rican culture), how people with otherwise “alternative” views can fit into and become personally empowered within a larger mainstream that they are often swimming against, and many more things.

Best of all, these conversations didn’t just stay within the four walls of our venue among the participants who attended physically, but it also reached out across the Internet thanks to the KinkForAll Providence live video stream, Twitter conversations, and KFAPVD liveblogs. I think the event’s use of the Internet was truly remarkable this time, because we were able to literally invite anyone in the world to literally watch and see and participate in the discussions that we were having, even if they were unable to be physically present, and even if not everyone agreed with what was being said all the time. Most importantly, as I said in my presentation, since we were able to inspire conversation, everyone stayed within the realm of constructive discourse, and that means we were able to create knowledge, even while individuals may have disagreed on some points.

Below is a video of my presentation. As usual, my presentation is “open source” and Creative Commons licensed. Feel free to download it, use it yourself, or share it with anyone you think might find it valuable. If you do, I would greatly appreciate a link back to this page.

On Dichotomies that (No Longer) Jail Me – KinkForAll Providence from maymay on Vimeo.

Download:

I am deeply grateful to Emma for helping me with this presentation and also for taking a leading role in unorganizing KinkForAll Providence (so I didn’t actually do so much this time—and I think that’s great!). Similarly, I’m also grateful to Aida Manduley for getting this event sponsored by SHEEC and for being the primary unorganizer for venue-related issues. There were some, but she handled them beautifully and deserves more praise for more reasons than many of you know. Their persistence, professionalism, thoroughness, and ardent support of sexual freedom, freedom of speech, and students’ rights were what made this event possible, even in the face of some very harsh and alarmist criticism.

With that thanks in mind, here’s the entirety of the presentation I gave at KinkForAll Providence as a text transcript:

First of all, let me just say that this is amazing. Look at all of us here at the fifth KinkForAll unconference in the first year of KinkForAll unconferences! KinkForAll Providence is now the 5th KinkForAll event being held in the 1-year history of the event’s conception. That’s one KinkForAll, in 4 different cities so far, about every 2 months or so for a whole year! Wow!

This event is thanks in large part to the amazing work of two women: Emma Gross, and Aida Manduley, who’s Chair of the Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council here at Brown University. They’re responsible for getting us this space and so much more. Let’s give them a huge hand! (APPLAUSE) I like that name: Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council. Health, education, and empowerment.

I like that name because I think we are actually taught, from a very young age, to see the world in dichotomies, a set of things that are exclusive from an opposing set of things. Dichotomies are necessarily polarizing and, if you’re not careful, they can be paralyzing. Indeed, dichotomies can be DISempowering.

Self-empowerment relies upon our ability to recognize existing dichotomies so that we can utilize them and, if necessary, so that we can break out of them. As Stephen R. Covey, author of the best-selling “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” reminds us:

Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.

Dichotomies are genuinely useful, even necessary. We use them all the time to make sense of the world around us. In fact, dichotomies themselves conveniently come in two mutually exclusive varieties! These are: true dichotomies, and false dichotomies.

Unfortunately, many of the dichotomies that contemporary culture teaches us are one kind are actually the other! Specifically, many dichotomies that you might’ve thought were true are actually false! According to Wiktionary, the Wikipedia-like dictionary, a false dichotomy, just so that we’re all on the same page, is:

A situation in which two alternative points of views are presented as the only options, whereas others are available.

How many of the dichotomies that hegemonic culture says are “true” do you think are actually false? I think the answer might surprise you, and that’s what I’m hoping to do in this presentation: I want to help you recognize these dichotomies. In fact, that’s what the entire founding concept behind KinkForAll is about!

KinkForAll’s tag line is:

A serendipitous, ad-hoc unconference about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life.

This idea, that sexuality can intersect with all the other things in our lives, seems to be something that a lot of people are really uncomfortable with. Their discomfort highlights several dichotomies, one of which is this one:

  • Obscene vs Decent

As it happens, this is one of the many false dichotomies that are societally constructed. How do we know that? Easy! Not everyone is uncomfortable with sexuality intersecting certain aspects of their lives, and some people are only uncomfortable with it intersecting with some parts of their lives, but not with others. This variability is the signature of all false dichotomies. Remember that!

Just to drive the point home, let me tell you a short story. Once upon a time (okay, actually in 1966), in a land far, far away (okay, actually in Kristiansand, Norway), lived a man by the name of Jens Bjørnboe. Jens was a painter and a school teacher, but more than anything else, he was a writer. Jens loved to write, and had already published a book of deeply religious poetry, Poems (Dikt, 1951), and a book that dealt with shortcomings of the school system, Jonas (1955).

Then, Jens wrote a fictional novel about an 18 year old girl named “Lillian” who had to masturbate to have orgasms, called Without a Stitch. According to one review:

Without a Stitch begins with a bit of girl-on-girl frolicking with Lillian and Brita [Lillian's classmate], as well as Lillian’s attempts at having fun with the inexperienced Henry. She can’t get the desired satisfaction when Henry fumbles around, and in reaction becomes a real cock-tease — and eventually she realises she needs some professional help. Thank god Brita refers her to Dr. Peterson.

Now, Dr. Peterson is, “a specialist in the orgasm” and Lillian entrusts herself into his care, with all the desired results. Nice. :) The review continues,

Lillian’s problem seems to be that she worries about what her mother and grandmother might think, causing these inhibitions that hold her back. But Dr. Peterson helps her overcome these, and instructs her in his own moral code — which amounts to that all sex is good (and more is apparently better …), as long as no one is hurt or taken advantage of. It takes a lot of daily sessions — during which she’s not allowed to be with any other man — to get the message across, but finally she’s cured.

All right, so: a woman of legal adulthood who was so concerned about what others might think of her that she can’t have orgasms overcomes that fear under the care of a physician who tells her that all sex is good as long as no one is hurt or taken advantage of. Okay, so there’s some lesbian scenes, but also some really strict monogamy. Doesn’t sound so out-there radical to me, really.

Unfortunately for Jens, it did sound radical to the government of Norway, and Bjørnboe suffered an obscenity conviction for publishing the book as pornography. Interestingly, his fictional porn would arguably pale in comparison to the non-fiction writing I’ve published on my own blog—and that I’ve read from countless other bloggers! Obviously then, we are obscene by some standards but not by others. Indeed, obscenity standards vary with time, place, and a host of other things.

More interestingly, perhaps, is the fact that Jens Bjørnboe went on to publish his most well-known work, The History of Bestiality, and as far as I can tell the Norwegian government didn’t care to prosecute him for publishing pornography in that case. Huh.

Jens was a pretty uncompromising man. He once said,

People speak of ’sexual morality,’ but that is a misleading expression. There is no special morality for sex. No matter what you do with yourself, whether you go to bed with girls or with boys, and no matter what it occurs to you to do with them or with yourself, no moral rule applies to that sphere of activity other than the principles that govern every aspect of life: honesty, courage, common humanity, consideration.

What Jens understood that I think is so valuable is that people who dichotomize consensual sexual activity into obscene and decent acts also tend to approach morality as a dichotomy; they couple obscene with immoral and decent with moral. Indeed, Jens sees that the failure to recognize one false dichotomy actually blurs one’s view of which other dichotomies are true and which are not. On the other hand, when you begin to see the gradations between things you once simplistically believed were absolutes, you empower yourself to break out of all false dichotomies.

Now, before I go any further, it’s important to mention that false dichotomies are not inherently bad things; they can be useful, as I mentioned, and they can be a lot of fun. Case in point, I think dichotomies of power are really fucking sexy! Specifically, I have always loved (and still love) playing—but not being—powerless. That is, I enjoy being sexually submissive.

Trouble is, I’m a man. Yes, I know what you’re thinking: DUH! Thing is, the fact that I’m a man wasn’t always clear to me. In fact, thanks to this really strong tendency that false dichotomies, when we incorrectly believe they are true, have of reinforcing one another, for the longest time I thought I was actually a woman! Yeah! Let me tell you why.

In mainstream Western society, and indeed in most modern cultures, this dichotomy of power–dominance on one hand and submission on the other–reinforces this other, totally unrelated anywhere but in some people’s minds, false dichotomy: the one of gender, with men on one side, and women on the other. And then, as if that weren’t enough, both of those false dichotomies are also strung together like this, so that dominance and manliness is also coupled with activity, while submission and femininity is also coupled with passivity. The trouble with that, for me, was that I like being active and I like being passive in bed!

And then, as if that weren’t enough, I turned 13, and I put a toothbrush in my butt–and I liked it! So now I discovered this other, additional incorrect coupling: penetration is coupled with being active, which, as we’ve already seen is coupled with manliness, which ostensibly makes it dominant. On the other side, being penetrated is coupled with being passive or “receptive,” which, remember, is coupled with womanliness, which makes it ostensibly submissive. So now my 13 year old self is totally fucking confused and has no idea what the fuck I am–man, woman, top, bottom, active partner, passive partner–except that I knew I really liked getting tied up and I really like my toothbrush in my butt.

But wait, there’s more! One year later, my younger brother made friends with this really cute guy in his class and he started coming over to our place and I got a really big crush on him. And that’s when I learned that contemporary culture said, if I was, in fact, a boy, that I was also gay! Yeah, even though I also also masturbated to thoughts of girls! Because apparently, to fit in with contemporary culture, you can’t be bisexual if you’re a man. You’ve gotta be either straight or gay. And even though I was “only” 14, I knew that if you like your toothbrush in your butt, you’re gay!

So, like, oh my god! Could I be a gay boy who liked girls? Was that possible? Was I just…wrong about everything? Fuck, was there something wrong with me? Maybe there was something wrong with these distinctions. Maybe not all of them were true dichotomies. Hmm….

Thankfully, I had (drum roll please) THE INTERNET! Yes, the Internet. I did some searches. I surfed a bunch of sites. I read a lot of porn. I had some more pretty confused orgasms. And then, I found this: The Kinsey Scale.

What was so interesting about the Kinsey scale was that it introduced me to this idea that there were gradations in sexual orientation. That’s when it clicked: I’m probably some kind of bisexual. So, ignoring for a moment the limitations of this concept, I figured that if there were gradations in sexual orientation, maybe there were gradations in a bunch of those other dichotomies.

Of course, it turns out, yes, there are. There’s a big wide world of queer between the poles of heteronormativity, switches enjoy varying consensual sexual power differentials, and even when it comes to anatomical characteristics there are varying degrees of intersexuality that mix male and female. So, long story short, even though I really liked that toothbrush, I eventually upgraded to a strap-on because I knew that 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 receptive buttsex, are in no way directly correlated.

Sure, sometimes I want penetration to be about power, but it never had to be anymore, because now I had the freedom, and the power to decide how anything outside of me would affect me. I found that the better I got at decoupling an activity from a preconceived notion of what it means, the more fun sex became. And even when I do choose to get penetrated submissively, it always has to be about good sex first and foremost, not about some misguided morality or sexist system of beliefs.

Okay, I know this is a talk at a conference about sexuality, but let’s return for a moment to KinkForAll’s tagline:

A serendipitous, ad-hoc unconference about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life.

What about the rest of life? Are dichotomies there, too? You betcha! Here’s an obvious one:

  • Black vs. White (or, more generally, race)

And here’s how we know that’s a false dichotomy:

  • Barack Obama
  • halle berry, jordan sparks, tony parker, derek jeter, tyson beckford (he’s jamaican and chinese), slash (the drummer from guns n roses), lisa wu hartwell

Here’s a not-so-obvious dichotomy, but one I bet most people who came to see me speak had to think about at least a little bit before they came here:

  • Public / private –> Out / closeted

For those that don’t know, when Sara Eileen and I co-founded KinkForAll, we took some very heavy criticism from people who believed that the essentially open and public nature of KinkForAll events were “recklessly endangering” participants, that we would be “outing” people. I believe this criticism was spawned from a belief in that false dichotomy: that to be public is to be out, that in order to have adequate privacy, people of sexuality minorities must be closeted.

That falsehood needlessly segregates sexuality apart from the rest of our lives. In reality, no one is ever completely in the closet or out of it. You might be out about some things to some people, but not out to others. By coming to KinkForAll events, people are forced to grapple with the reality that the closet is not a binary.

Here’s another one that KinkForAll events make some people grapple with:

  • Academic / non-academic (education)

    • also known as

  • educated / uneducated
  • graduate / drop-out

I like this one because I’m a middle-school drop-out. But anyway, after she gave a presentation at the very first KinkForAll in New York City, Emily Rutherford wrote this in her blog about the experience:

I think that a lot of what was exciting about [KinkForAll] is the way that the format combines academic and non-academic modes of talking about sex and sexuality. The “conference” is an academic model in a way that many existing modes of social interaction for sexuality groups aren’t, but this conference didn’t presume any academic background or qualifications. I think that [KinkForAll] bridged gaps between different registers of discussion, taking academese down a peg while applying a theoretical and philosophical level to more casual conversations.

KinkForAll is not really an “organization,” just individuals acting in concert toward a share goal; a collective, maybe. I was urged, numerous times, to trademark KinkForAll and a few people thought it needed to be a registered 501(c)3 organization to really make a difference at all. But that’s just another false dichotomy, because we don’t need to be a 501(c)3 to make a difference.

Indeed, the millennial generation–our generation–is recognizing more and more false dichotomies, and younger people are consistently speaking up to make a difference. That’s what David Jay did in 2001, when he was a 19 year old undergraduate student at Wesleyan University just a few hours from here. David said:

Sexuality is like any other activity. There are people for whom skydiving, chocolate cake and soccer are their world. But some people don’t like skydiving, chocolate cake or soccer. There’s no reason to focus your energy and attention on something you feel no reason to do anything about.

That year, David founded The Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), which became the online headquarters for the asexuality movement. David recognized that even sex drive itself is correctly seen by many as coupled to dichotomies; that mens’ drives is necessarily stronger than womens’, for instance. Contrary to popular belief, sex is not a compulsion, and the desire for sex is not a universally shared instinct.

I believe AVEN’s work is enormously important because rape culture will dissipate and victim-blaming will stop only when everyone understands that our sex drives–our feelings of lust–are an independent facet of our sociosexual makeup. Men are no more or less interested in sex because they are men than women are. Perhaps counter-intuitively, asexuality is the keystone that supports a healthily sexual society.

All right, so, let’s review. Dichotomies come in two flavors: true and false. Both kinds are useful, and potentially sexy, but not good to confuse. So don’t let “man” or “woman” jail you. Don’t even let “animal” or “person” jail you! Hell, The Supreme Court isn’t letting the insignificant detail of corporeal existence prevent corporations from being people!

The bottom line is this: don’t wait for permission to do or be something that doesn’t fit into whatever or wherever other people happen to think you are. You don’t need someone’s permission to break out of a false dichotomy, or to become empowered.

You just do it. You can do it. We broke out of restrictive dichotomies just being at KinkForAll Providence! You’re doing it now if you’re watching this video, ‘cuz you’re thinking. So you don’t need to wait for your schools, or parents, or your teachers to fill you with knowledge, or to give you permission to grow in whatever direction you want. You’re doing it already.

You become empowered whenever you do what you can to make our communities places we can be proud of, no matter how small an act it is. Cuz, y’see, your impact, even through small things, like sharing a link to some educational resource like the one I followed to find the Kinsey scale when I was a teenager, are kind of a big deal.

People with destructive goals are usually people who feel personally disempowered. So to be creative, you need to empower everyone to speak up, to have a presence—even people you don’t totally agree with.

And thinking about that, and seeing as how I broached this subject of dichotomies with quotes from a writer, I thought it fitting to end with another quote from another, recently passed writer, Howard Zinn. Howard Zinn said:

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

KinkForAll is one of my small acts. Now it’s your turn. :)

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Monday, January 11, 2010

The Internet made me a sexual freedom activist in 2009. Now it’s your turn.

Category labels: Communication, Community, Kink events, Technology, Vanilla life

In case you haven’t yet heard, this upcoming Tuesday (the 12th) at the Center for Sex and Culture, I’m going to be co-facilitating Deviants Online, a new “workshop” series produced by Sarah Dopp, the inspirational founder of Genderfork.com. Sarah describes the workshop as:

a monthly social media discussion workshop in San Francisco for queers, sex nerds, artists, and other rebels. We dig into best practices and strategies for using tools like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, blogs, and email lists to make our lives more awesome.

Well, it’s certainly been an awesome year. As I wrote recently at MaleSubmissionArt.com:

For me, 2009 was a year of massive personal upheaval, as though a wildfire swept through my life and left me fresh and raw. It hurt, but like all natural processes, it also provided an incredible opportunity for rejuvenation.

Increasingly, one of those opportunities I want to pursue is continuing to develop the MaleSubmissionArt.com project. It began at the start of this year because there was a depressing lack of respectful erotic imagery of submissive masculinity. Today, it broke into the top 3,000 Tumblr blogs in the United States, and the top 6,000 in the world (according to Tumblr’s “Tumblarity” thing). If that weren’t cool enough, because it’s not, (as of this writing) it’s the top Google result for many variations of search phrases that are obviously about finding pictures of submissive men. Positive feedback has been pouring in, and I’m only now beginning to archive some of the praise for MaleSubmissionArt.com.

One month after starting MaleSubmissionArt, which took all of 2 hours (literally), I introduced the concept of KinkForAll, an ad-hoc sexuality “unconference” with the potential to greatly empower sex-positive advocacy and drastically improve sex education as we know it today. In a matter of mere months, less than one year later, 4 KinkForAll unconferences have produced an astonishing amount of free video, audio, and other content that’s continuing to snowball to this day. In fact, the video of my presentation at KinkForAll Washington DC has—in only 2 months time—received over 1,500 views, and is steadily spreading at the pace of about 25 plays per day (according to Vimeo’s public statistics).

And, most recently, I revitalized the Kink On Tap podcasts from way back in 2007, bringing interactivity and participation to a whole new level for sexuality netcasts. In only 3 months, and for an infinitesimal budget of a mere several hundred dollars raised purely from continuing donations, the weekly live broadcasts bring together a growing group of anywhere from 30 to 50 very animated individuals to the chat room, and several dozen more downloading and listening to the recorded Kink On Tap audio podcast available from iTunes. The show’s attracting superb guests, like Suraya Singh of Filament Magazine and Ms. SF Leather 2009 Mollena Williams, among a plethora of fantastic panelists who are excitedly sharing what they know and love about sexuality with our listeners.

None of this would’ve been possible without the incredible opportunities that the Internet brings with it. But none of this is enough—not even close. It’s wonderful that I’ve been doing so much, so inexpensively, and with such impact. But I’m not satisfied merely doing things. Underlying all of these projects is a much, much bigger goal: empowering you.

So I’m setting out for 2010 with the intention that this is the year that what I do with my time focuses not merely on educating, advocating, or informing, but also empowering the people with whom I interact. There’s a saying I recently learned that’s prevalent in software development communities: “Improve the improvers.” In other words, make it possible for passionate people to participate in your project immediately.

With renewed commitment to this goal, I quit my day job this past Friday. I have no clear idea about how I’m going to make a living, but I’m less concerned about that than I am about succeeding in my other goals. I feel like, if I do a good job with that (no pun intended), then a living will find me, somehow.

In the mean time, I’m eagerly preparing for this upcoming Tuesday evening at the CSC, where Sarah and I would love to see you for the January 2010 Deviants Online workshop. Or if you can’t make it for any reason at all, then perhaps someone you know—or someone who knows of you—can come, so please help spread the word to anyone you think would find this event helpful. :)

Here’s the entirety of Sarah’s announcement post about Tuesday’s event:

The first workshop was amazing – great conversation & lots of amazing ideas and concepts were brought up. We’re looking forward to doing it all over again in January – so here’s the information for you to add to your calendar, pimp out to your friends, and note in your holiday cards as you send them out. We hope you can join us – and bring along a buddy!

maymay

Meitar "maymay" Moscovitz

Deviants Online
hosted by Sarah Dopp
with special guest Meitar “maymay” Moscovitz

Tuesday, January 12th, 6 – 8pm
Center for Sex & Culture, 1519 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA
Cost: $10-20 sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds

Deviants Online explores the ever-changing “best practices” for social media: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, flickr, blogging, email, websites, and everything else. How can we shine spotlights on what we care about without annoying our friends? What are smart ways to strengthen our relationships and broaden our networks? And how exactly do we get our (many) personal sides to co-exist with our professional life on the same Internet?

As queers, creatives, sex nerds, and other rebels, our lives depend heavily on our friends and extended communities. Whether we’re looking for work opportunities, an audience, or an army of allies, we can all benefit from having a broader network built on trust and appreciation.

In this open-ended discussion workshop, we’ll explore what works and what doesn’t when it comes to representing ourselves online. The material will include a balanced mix of “how to think about it” and “how to do it,” and we’ll have plenty of time for questions. Whether you’ve just signed up for Facebook or have been blogging for years, you’ll leave this workshop full of ideas on what you want to try next.

Deviants Online is hosted by Sarah Dopp, social media educator and founder of http://genderfork.com. It will also have a special guest co-facilitator, maymay!

Why maymay is Awesome
Meitar “maymay” Moscovitz is a “technology geek, sexual freedom and community activist, prickly blogger, and general free spirit.” He makes his living as an Internet technology professional, providing web development, social media consulting, and other technology services. He is the co-author of Foundation Website Creation and AdvancED CSS,and a semi-regular blogger at SitePoint.com. He has lead sessions at conferences such as Sex 2.0, often speaks on the intersection of technology and sexuality, and is a co-founder of the BarCamp-style sexuality unconference series KinkForAll. He also curates the photoblog “Male Submission Art“, co-hosts the webcast KinkOnTap, and has dozens of other projects in various stages of creation.

***Please note: Portions of this event will be recorded and posted online. If you don’t want your voice, name, or image to be included in the recording, you can still come — we’ll give you easy ways to stay off camera. There will also be a stretch of time in the middle that’s completely off-the-record.

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Saturday, December 12, 2009

My impressions on the new “sex-positive social network” Blackbox Republic

Category labels: Community, Reviews, Technology, Vanilla life

Social media. Internet publishing. Privacy. Three phrases that have seemed to be at tenacious odds with each other in a multitude of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For people like me, who have progressive views about sexuality, these three things are constantly on our minds. How do we participate in the online revolution without being forced to “come out” about every sex act we enjoy, some of which are still illegal thanks to draconian restrictions on sexual freedom, even (and especially?) in America.

This month, a new social network called Blackbox Republic (BBR) is attempting to tackle this head-on and aims to create a place for, as Marshall Kirkpatrick put it, this particular large and unserved group of people. Although BBR is clearly a business, it’s a business whose creators have laudable intentions for positive social and cultural change. In that respect, and in many others, Blackbox Republic is worth a close look.

I was informed about the venture via Clarisse Thorn many months ago. I got in touch with BBR and signed up for a limited-offer “founder” account—basically a private beta. The founder account gave me free access to the features of the BlackboxRepublic.com website for what would normally be a $25 monthly subscription fee.

So, without further ado, here are my impressions about Blackbox Republic, and how its launch may be just what the Internet needs to get us moving in the right direction with regards to personal privacy, and mainstream awareness of the different needs of different people on the Internet.

Mainstream sex-positivity or a VIP room in cyberspace? Or both?

Over the past few months, Blackbox Republic has been building a marketing arsenal of anticipation and intrigue. Its creators are successful in non-sexuality-focused spheres of influence: Sam Lawrence is the respected former Chief Marketing Officer of Jive Software, Inc., and April Donato, has experience in community management. They also both jive (pun!) well with the sex-positive movement, discussing it at length in the early stages of their marketing efforts after de-cloaking the new company.

In an interview for Social Networking Watch, Sam Lawrence said,

[Sam Lawrence:] The co-founder [April Donato] and myself are part of [the sex-positive] community. Sex positive means that your sexuality is not an issue. You don’t have an issue with other people’s sexuality. You’re open to what other people are interested in and what their boundaries are, and you’re open with your own.

[…]

[Interviewer:] To what extent do you practice a sex-positive lifestyle?

[Sam Lawrence:] From the perspective of sex not being an issue, I think that love is generated by people being open enough about who they are as people to put all of themselves out on the table. As far as putting all of myself on the table, it’s something that I do every single day.

I have an enormous amount of respect for anyone able to so capably present themselves as authentically as Sam does. On the eve of KinkForAll New York City 2, I met Sam and April at one of their “founder meetups” and had the chance to talk to them face-to-face. Our conversation revolved around the importance of steadfastly holding true to one’s own desires and having appropriate places to express those things with appropriate communication tools. I really liked their emphasis on self-identification over labeling throughout our discussion.

I also really appreciated the way that Sam and April spoke about their target audience. Blackbox Republic will welcome everyone, but it’s not designed for everyone, and I think that’s a good thing. David Evans writing at Online Dating Post says,

BBR has room for everyone, but is not for everyone. Definitely catering to non-mainstream folks, it will soon feature a constellation of micro-communities, or groups, called Camps. BBR doesn’t tell people how to organize their camps; we’ll do it ourselves, thankyouverymuch.

So is Blackbox Republic a dating site, or a social network? Well, both, kind of. Part of BBR’s slogan includes, “Dates will happen. Sex will happen. It matters how you get there.” The implication, of course, being that the current suite of tools for finding love or play online—sites like Alt.com, OkCupid, and countless personals boards—focus too strongly on the end result, turning matchmaking into a meat market instead of the natural process of getting to know one another. The focus BBR is placing on each person’s “journey” is an extremely welcome paradigm shift in the online dating world.

Along with the welcome and (IMHO, painfully obviously better) new approach to online dating, however, Blackbox Republic faces some real challenges. For new users, the service costs a minimum of $5 a month to use (and $9 per month for new sign-ups starting in 2010), which gives access to basic features like a personal profile. For $25 a month, members get added features like the ability to list real-world meet-ups, send private messages, and partake in a virtual “gifting” economy (think LiveJournal’s “virtual gifts“).

For that reason, BBR has been called a “members-only club.” There are some legitimate differences of opinion as to whether this is a positive or a negative thing. In a press release over the summer, Blackbox Republic is reported as stating:

Blackbox Republic will be a members-only experience that will unite the sex-positive community and give them a personal, private and secure way to connect online and in person.

Writing for ZDNet, Oliver Marks likens Blackbox Republic’s approach to online dating to the fashionability of owning an Apple computer:

Think of Blackbox Republic as a fashionable online ‘members-only’ club where you might expect to meet people with similar interests to your own, and ideally the person of your dreams. […] Blackbox Republic is arguably an Apple product to Facebook’s Windows look & feel: a much more intimately crafted, fuller featured personal user interface which should appeal to Apple generation sensibilities.

Many pages on Blackbox Republic's website showcase fashionably dressed women.

Many pages on Blackbox Republic's website showcase fashionably dressed women.

Indeed, almost everything about Blackbox Republic’s marketing and design seems to me as though it’s positioning itself as the equivalent of the hip, new, and exclusive nightclub down the street. There are images of super-chic women in short skirts and tight pants all over the Blackbox Republic promotional pages—way more than there are pictures of men. I was (yet again) put-off by this over-prevalence of women in all advertising material.

This isn’t really a criticism of the site, but rather a statement of disappointment that the marketing gurus behind the effort seemed to me to have succumbed to overwhelming cultural pressure to sell their site with old-school sex appeal: women’s sex appeal, of course. How…traditional.

Not only is the Blackbox Republic intro video markedly gender-skewed, but somewhere along the line Sam and April decided to drop the “sex-positive” phraseology from their marketing:

[L]ike most startups, Blackbox decided it needed to change up. Observers were confused by the sex-positive label.

Oh well. I think this just goes to further showcase how much more social change we really need in our culture.

However, while the clubby, cliquey feel is totally my own subjective perception, there are other issues at play here, too. Most notably, as Clarisse Thorn and many others rightfully remind us very often, the sex-positive movement is overwhelmingly white, middle- to upper-class, college-educated, and privileged in a huge number of ways that many people often take for granted. Even without a for-pay social network, not everyone who wants to can participate in the great-sex-for-everyone party atmosphere of many sex-positive niches.

Will creating a “members-only club” of sex-positivity on the Internet really be a positive thing for “the movement”? Well, maybe. Although it has the potential to exclude lower-income people from the experience, who are sadly also often the people with the most pressing need for the kinds of privacy-related tools BBR offers (school teachers spring to mind!), one upside is that Blacbox Republic promises to pledge a portion of membership dues to a charity of the user’s choice.

It’s $25 a month and $5 of those community dues go to charity. One way to think about it is if you’re sex-positive, you can either spend money on expensive coffee every month or upgrade your social life and meet other sex-positive people like you.

Inescapably, the major selling point of any social network is, of course, the network! If your friends aren’t on Twitter, then you’re probably not going to find it useful. The same truth holds for Blackbox Republic: if the users you want to interact with aren’t there, I doubt you’re going to find the experience fruitful. Due to the membership fees and the socioeconomic realities of the sex-positive community, I’m concerned that BBR’s current business model is too exclusive, and as a result it will have a lot of trouble attracting the kind of diverse community its creators seem to be hoping for.

Yet, some others think differently (pun!). For instance, Dennis Howlett welcomes the for-pay model for a social network:

anyone can join provided they’re willing to pay the $25 a month (I like that he has a pay model from the get go. That sorts out the weirdos and hangers on from day one)

I wonder if adopting a free-mium approach might work better. Still, there are real-world limits to business. Everyone needs to make money, and I don’t think Blackbox Republic’s business model is inherently more exclusive than, say, purchasing access to porn. If anything, BBR’s got some real promise to inject much-needed financial awareness to the sexually insensitive corporate infrastructure of our society. Nevertheless, convincing people to join “the Republic” is going to be a hard sell.

Show me the features!

Let’s say you do decide to join. What do you get? Other than the sex-positive mindset, what’s the benefit?

Well, the bulk of the experience is what you’d expect. Profiles (called “personas”), messaging, user search capabilities (called “explore”), and so forth. A Twitter-like “activity stream” dominates the main page where you can post text, picture, or video status updates. Event listings fill the sidebar. (I’m not going to provide internal screenshots in deference to BBR’s strict confidentiality rules.)

While that’s fun, it’s nothing special. What makes Blackbox Republic different is flexibility, and privacy.

Goodbye drop-downs, hello sliders!

An innovative new interface acknowledges (most of) the diversity in human sexual experience and desire.

An innovative new interface acknowledges (most of) the diversity in human sexual experience and desire.

Blackbox Republic’s most visible feature is the way its interface allows you to flexibly self-identify various facets of yourself. Rather than give you static drop-down menus or radio buttons for things like your sexual orientation and relationship status, you’re presented with sliders you can change at will. Perhaps you’re feeling particularly same-sex attracted one day. Just move the “Orientation” slider towards the “Gay” end and away from the “Hetero” end. If that changes tomorrow, just move the slider back. Sho-weet!

BBR offers you 5 different sliders for your profile. In addition to the one for sexual orientation, you also get one for relationship “status” (ranging from attached to unattached, with Facebook’s famous “it’s complicated” neatly in the middle), whether you’re available for more partners or not, how comfortable you are with casual sexual activity, and how eagerly you’re looking to par-tay. I’m instantly reminded of FetLife’s innovative, if dull-looking, mechanism for specifying multiple relationships. Blackbox Republic gives you similar flexibility as FetLife does but presented in a superb and far more intuitive interface.

All that said, one slider is conspicuously missing: the one for gender. The sliders are a very interesting idea and might just be the most innovative feature of the entire site. It speaks volumes about the sensitive and thoughtful mindset of the developers, and that’s why I’m so disappointed that the interface for self-identifying gender is relegated to the Sex 1.0 days of a single, binary option of “male” or “female.”

What gives? Are polyamorous people more welcome here than those who don’t fit the gender binary? I hope this is simply an omission that will be fixed as the service matures, since I couldn’t find any other reason why gender was absent from the sliders. For extra credit, I hope to see different profile options for “Sex” and “Gender,” two distinct concepts that frequently and incorrectly get used interchangeably. This would make it possible to represent complex gender presentations like additive gender on a social networking interface for the first time ever, and that’d totally be something to write home about!

Privacy and security

The other major selling point of Blackbox Republic is its careful attention to privacy. The entire offering, including its name, is predicated on letting users very carefully segment their information based on their privacy boundaries. I love some of the things BBR has done to enable this, and I can only imagine it’s going to get better from here.

Blackbox Republic’s Web of Trust

There are three levels of privacy, which (as far as I can figure out) map directly to the level of trust other members have gained within the Republic’s community. It works like a web of trust. New users are “un-vouched.” As they begin to interact with others on the site and, hopefully, make some friends, they should receive “vouches”—or votes of trust—from previously-vouched members. As a member, you get to control whether something you do, such as posting a status update, gets sent to the “public,” (i.e., the entire public-facing Internet), to all Blackbox Republic members (i.e, to both vouched and un-vouched members) or only to vouched members.

Additionally, privacy settings allow you to specify whether you want to allow un-vouched members to send you private messages, to follow your updates, to comment on your posts, or to see you in search results.

Unlike Facebook, which has very good privacy controls that almost nobody on Earth is aware of (thus negating the control’s usefulness), Blackbox Republic makes it a point to highlight their privacy controls at just about every sensical turn. Each of the settings I found defaults to the most private setting, not the most public, which is exactly the right move. I gotta say, I found turning off privacy settings instead of having to turn (or leave) them on to be a really empowering feeling.

You’re not a “friend,” you’re an acquaintance!

Moreover, the Blackbox Republic platform makes a native distinction between “friends” (again, like Facebook, or FetLife) and “followers” (like Twitter). When I friend someone, I’m connected to them in a way that I’m not if I just follow someone. I’m not yet certain what the practical distinction between “friending” and “following” are, other than the fact that your view of the people you’re connected with is segmented based on which button you clicked, but I think the distinction is a very appropriate and natural one to embed in the software.

This separation is probably the single most important innovation in the space of social networks as a medium of communication and collaboration that I can point at. I love that I can indicate without ambiguity which people I want to remain in constant communication with and which I simply want to watch from a distance. After all, aren’t at least some of your “friends” on Facebook really just “acquaintances” in reality? I think that for the first time ever in a social network, Blackbox Republic gets this feature right. Now, if only I could figure out what it actually does. :)

What? No on-the-wire encryption?!

With all that being said, there’s still at least one really frightening problem with Blacbox Republic’s careful attention to privacy: as far as I could tell, no part of my session is SSL/TLS encrypted!

Stunningly, for a site that sells privacy, not even Blackbox Republic's login form is on a secure page.

Stunningly, for a site that sells privacy, not even Blackbox Republic's login form is on a secure page.

The entire BlackboxRepublic.com website is served over HTTP, including the login form and—again, as far as I could tell—every page on the inside of the site. This means that it’s trivial for malicious people who don’t even have a Blackbox Republic subscription to intercept, eavesdrop, and modify my interaction with the site. They could watch—and save—private messages between me and one of my friends (or lovers!), for instance.

In Blackbox’s defense, I don’t know of any social network that protects you from this. FetLife is another example of a website that should seriously consider HTTPS-only pages, but as of this writing hasn’t implemented it. Therein lies one of the most frightening oversights in the entire social networking space: regardless of so-called privacy settings, everything you do on the vast majority of social networks, blogs, and other sites on the Internet are the equivalent of passing notes between friends in a classroom. Better hope that big bully who likes to steal your lunch money doesn’t open the note and read it himself while he’s passing along your login details!

The thing is, few other social networking sites place so strong a spotlight on user privacy and security. Since Blackbox Republic seems to be nobly and rightfully holding itself up to a new standard of privacy, I feel justified in pointing out this glaring omission in their service offering. Given everything else they’ve done so well, and how well-aligned the majority of their technical implementation seems to be with their philosophy, this omission came as a big surprise to me.

Until Blackbox Republic only serves HTTPS traffic for all private areas of their site, I can’t make a recommendation in good conscious that it’s the place to be for privacy-conscious people. But again, despite public opinion to the contrary, I’ve never been able to make that claim for FetLife either.

Conclusion

Blackbox Republic is one of the most interesting websites on the Internet today. Its privacy-conscious and sexually open approach to social networking and online dating deserves huge praise. Its technical implementation—although plagued with some glaring oversights for now—is to be seriously respected.

From a social change perspective, I think the site is a mixed bag. Its exclusivity arguably makes the insularity of the sexuality communities an even bigger problem than it already is. On the other hand, the market-value of that very same exclusivity, if steered toward a benevolent purpose, can end up benefiting philanthropic, non-profit, and other sex-positive endeavors that often struggle to find necessary financial support.

Moreover, Blackbox Republic’s internal gifting economy does seem to encourage a sort of altruistic nature among members. How that may or may not translate into increased support for non-commercial activists has yet to be seen. Nay-sayers should remember that this kind of thing simply hasn’t been done before and the net effect could be quite positive.

Having just launched, however, I don’t think Blackbox Republic should be touted as the go-to site for sex-positive people quite yet. Like other social networks, it needs to grow to become truly useful, and its subscription fee business model poses a serious obstacle to many people. I was fortunate to get in with a free “founder” account, but I have mixed feelings about encouraging my friends to join me knowing they—or someone nice enough to “gift” a limited-time subscription to them—will have to pay for the service.

Additionally, its focus on being, well, a black box and its commitment to not allow Google or other search engines to index its internal content simply doesn’t resonate that strongly with me.

Lawrence emphasizes that what members say in Blackbox Republic will stay private. There’s no danger of what they post inside becoming part of their “Google resume,” as he puts it. He says he would resist efforts from search engines to index content the way Facebook and Twitter allow. “The value proposition is this is the first private, large social network out there,” Lawrence says.

Put simply, and noting that I’m probably not the majority case here, I rely on my “Google résumé,” to use Sam’s words, to live the life I want. My lukewarm reaction to this isn’t a criticism of the goal, simply an observation that it turns out I’m not in the ideal target market for Blackbox Republic’s value proposition.

In other words, I think I’m “too out” for this site to be immediately useful to me. The fact that FetLife is not readily available to the public Internet is the single biggest reason why I don’t sign on to that site very often, and so I have the same reason not to spend all that much time behind the curtains of Blackbox Republic.

Nevertheless, many other people do. If you’re among the cross-section of the populace who’d like a sociosexual experience online and would also like to effectively outsource your social reputation management, if you will, but you feel that sites like Facebook just aren’t cutting it, then Blackbox Republic is definitely worth checking out.

If you do check it out, or even if you don’t, I’d love to know what you think in the comments. And if you’re definitely sold, consider signing up via my partner link. Full disclosure: signing up that way earns me a small commission. If you’d rather sign up but not give me a commission for the referral, just register from the front page.

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Monday, November 23, 2009

Sexual Adultism at KinkForAll Washington DC

Category labels: Generation gap, Kink events, Politics of sex, Vanilla life

Over the weekend, I participated in KinkForAll Washington DC, which was small but amazing. Without a doubt, this was the most controversial KinkForAll unconference we’ve held, because the original venue was going to be the Bethesda Chevy-Chase High School. The idea that we’d have an educational sexuality event at a high school instantly put many people on guard.

Quite a number of people who signed up to participate on the wiki page removed their names. Some also unsubscribed from the KinkForAll mailing list. A few even went so far as to accuse me, personally, of carelessly risking getting everyone involved registered as sex offenders. The amount of backlash coming from the alternative sexuality communities—groups of people who are supposedly sexually progressive—to the idea of being available to minors totally blew me away.

I was so surprised, saddened, and disappointed by the vehemence of the opposition from otherwise freedom-loving people that I resolved to use my presentation slot at KFADC to share my thoughts about youth sexuality. I video recorded the presentation I gave, which I titled, “Sexual Adultism: The tragedy of youth sexual oppression.” A full transcript as well as a downloadable copy of the presentation is below. Please help me spread awareness of this important issue by redistributing this presentation or sharing a link back to this page.

Sexual Adultism – KinkForAll Washington DC from maymay on Vimeo.

Download the presentation files here:

Anyway, for an event that was bad-mouthed, and suffered from incredible amounts of FUD, not to mention legal and political struggles, the unconference was surprisingly well-attended and extraordinarily vibrant. I counted just over 30 people by lunch time, and more showed up after the lunch break. I think I can safely say that about 50 people participated over the course of the day.

Even more heartwarming than the attendance numbers, numerous teenagers and some minors were present. The president of a local high school Gay Straight Alliance not only showed up, but also lead a discussion! One of the points she made was how vital the support of school administration is in running an effective GSA. She told story after story of unhelpful and helpful school Principles, teachers, and other adults. The overtones of adultism in the frustrating stories were unmistakeable.

My favorite part about KFADC was after the event itself, when a group of about 15 of us went for dinner at a nearby noodle restaurant. One man came up to me privately and said, “I just wanted to let you know that you changed my mind about the youth issue.”

“Really?” I asked, smiling.

“Yeah,” he explained. “I joined the KinkForAll mailing list and saw the arguments about minors and was just instantly put off. I started think that maybe this was a bad idea. But then, after listening to your presentation, I realized how stupid the fighting was.”

The ensuing conversation was the highlight of my day. Even if I only opened one person’s eyes about how damaging sexual adultism really is, then I think all of my efforts over the past few months was well worth it, because we have to start somewhere. Why not here?

Since this post is getting linked a lot more than the transcript of my presentation is, I decided to put the transcript into the Post, so, below, you’ll find an embedded version of the full transcript. Additionally, you might also find the precursor to this post, On Youth, Sexuality, Education, and Your Fears, worth reading, as well.

Thank you all for coming to KinkForAll Washington DC. As some of you may already be aware, the original venue of this event were classrooms at the Bethesda Chevy-Chase High School. We’ve changed venues, however, due to pressure from the Montgomery County School Board, who cited fears that this event would attract sex offenders to the school grounds and thus put schoolchildren at risk. So, without some small effort, we moved.

If the fears of the school board were an isolated case, I probably wouldn’t be giving this talk. But the school board’s reactions to bar this unconference from happening in high school classrooms exemplify a nation-wide pandemic of a disease so insidious and so virulent that the numbers of people who are harmed or even killed by it is literally uncountable. The root of this disease is called adultism.

For those who are unaware of this phenomenon, indulge me in a brief digression to define the concept. Adam Fletcher, founder of The Freechild Project, defines adultism thusly:

Adultism is discrimination against young people. It happens anytime children or youth are ignored, silenced, neglected or punished because they are not adults. [...] adultism is part of the structure of society and its institutions, including families, schools, churches and the government. [...] adultism is expressed by treating the young person as weak, helpless and less intelligent than adults.

John Bell says:

adultism refers to behaviors and attitudes based on the assumption that adults are better than young people, and entitled to act upon young people without their agreement. [...] As children, most young people are told what to eat, what to wear, when to go to bed, when they can talk, that they will go to school, which friends are okay, and when they are to be in the house.

[...]

If this were a description of the way a group of adults was treated, we would all agree that their oppression was almost total. However, for the most part, the adult world considers this treatment of young people as acceptable because we were treated in much the same way, and internalized the idea that ‘that’s the way you treat kids.’

Bell’s explanation continues,

The essence of adultism is disrespect of the young. Consider how the following comments are essentially disrespectful. What are the assumptions behind each of them? Do you remember having heard any of these as a younger person?

  • “You’re so smart for fifteen!”
  • “You are too old for that!” or “You’re not old enough!”
  • “What do you know? You haven’t experienced anything!”
  • “It’s just a stage. You’ll outgrow it.”

I can think of no function of society unhindered by adultism. In wishing to restrict high schoolers and other young people from participating in this event, where sexuality is discussed publicly and peer-to-peer education about sexuality is a driving goal, one is falling prey to adultism. This wish also highlights a secondary deeply-ingrained problem: sexual paranoia. No where are the symptoms of sexual paranoia more prevalent than when they intersect with the young.

The symptoms of sexual paranoia are unambiguous and unmistakable. They include spreading sexual misinformation, internalizing shame about sexuality, feeling afraid of sex and sexual expression, and ultimately desiring to promote censorship of all things sexuality-related as a form of so-called “protection.” Further, in the worst cases, it leads to agoraphobia and deaths, often by suicide.

Now, it’s important to mention that the people perpetuating the climate of fear around sexuality and youth truly believe they are protecting society in general and young people in specific. It’s admirable to want to protect our kids from pedophiles, our daughters from over pushy gray-raping boyfriends, and even ourselves from being registered as sex offenders for no good reason. Even if their actions are not rational, their fears are not imagined. But until we educate our children, our policy makers, and ourselves, we will all be forever doomed to live in fear–of the dirty old man down the street, of over-eager prosecutors and politicians, or even of our own bodies.

If you truly want to protect our children from sexual abuse, then education is far and away the best protection you can give them. And yet, sadly, even in otherwise unbiased communities, many people are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that young people might want to participate, almost always citing fears that access to sexuality information could be traumatic. Tragically, projecting such sexual paranoia onto young people is actually killing many of them.

Adultist sex-negativity is, of course, the intersection of two realms of fear-mongering: the sex is going to turn us all into sinners one, and the everything in the world is going to kill our children one. The effects of this pandemic fearfulness are devastating in the mainstream population but it’s even more devastating in minority and alternative sexuality communities. As Ramon Johnson points out in his article on LGBT suicide:

[LGBTQ] youth are up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers, according to the Massachusetts 2006 Youth Risk Survey. A 2007 San Francisco State University Chavez Center Institute study shows that LGBT and questioning youth who come from a rejecting family are up to nine times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. And for every completed suicide by a young person, it is estimated that 100 to 200 attempts are made (2003 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey).

In society’s rush to protect our children from harmful sexuality, children’s own defense mechanisms have been damaged. As Erin Runnion, founder of The Joyful Child foundation, which aims to protect children against sexual molestation, says, Kids need their freedom. At some point they’re going to have to take care of themselves, so it’s better to start empowering them and giving them the confidence that they can handle that, and that they can handle their world, than to make them so afraid that it’s just an evil place. (Quote is at 19:57 in Episode 8, Season 6 of “Penn & Teller’s: Bullsh*t!”)

This misguided approach to protecting children from the dangers of the world simultaneously piles unreasonable expectations on parents, teachers, policy-makers, and law enforcement. In 2003, the Dallas Observer reported on the case of Jacqueline Mercado and her boyfriend, who were arrested and indicted for “sexual performance of a child” when they developed a photograph of their 1-year-old son breastfeeding from Jacqueline’s breast at a local drugstore. Child Protective Services took away their two children and ordered all kinds of onerous counseling and tests. To any reasonable person not infected by sexual paranoia, seeing a mother breastfeeding her child would not incite the kind of fear that it clearly did in the case of the this photo developer.

Stories like Jacqueline’s are not uncommon. A similar story appeared just a few months ago when a Wal-Mart employee in Arizona reported Mr. and Mrs. Demaree to the cops as sex offenders and child pornographers for attempting to develop photographs of their three daughters, each younger than 5, taking a bath. As a result, the three little girls were taken away from their parents for more than a month.

The drugstore and Wal-Mart employees in these cases, and the Montgomery County School Board in the case of ousting this event from school grounds, were probably all imagining the dirty old man down the street. But such unsavory characters are more often the stuff of nightmares than reality. In fact, according to the US Department of Justice’s statistical report entitled, Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement, 14 year old teenagers are apparently the most sexually dangerous group in America. (Reference: Figure 6, pg 8 of US Department of Justice statistical report, “Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement: Victim, Incident, and Offender Characteristics”.)

How can 14 year olds be the most likely group of American citizens to be child molesters and sex offenders? Well, according to a 2008 news article in the Seattle P-I, more than 3,500 teenagers and adolescents in the State of Washington averaging 14 years old have been charged and convicted as felony sex offenders since 1997.

In December of 2006, the Denver Post reported on a Utah court case in which two 13 year old heterosexual adolescents were convicted of sexually molesting each other. They, too, are now both registered sex offenders. This story showcases a horrible double-standard of youth sexuality: at 13, you’re too young to be capable of consenting to sex, but apparently you’re old enough to consciously decide to sexually molest someone else.

In Georgia, then-17 year old Wendy Whitaker became a registered sex offender for having consensual oral sex with a fellow high school classmate 3 weeks before his 16th birthday. Now a housewife, she filed a lawsuit against the state of Georgia that says, “The gravity of Whitaker’s offense ‘bears no reasonable relationship’ to the harshness of her penalty.”

There’s little about paranoia that can be reasonable. Whitaker’s case is interesting because had she committed her “crime” just three weeks later, her legal standing today would be dramatically different. It raises the question: is age a reasonable measure for determining the criminality of sexual activity? If so, at what age should sexual curiosity become criminal? At what age should it stop?

Unfortunately, today’s laws codify a supreme oversimplification of the issues at hand. Age itself is merely a number, and setting any age as the primary or sole determining factor of criminality reduces consent to a boolean value: either you can or you can’t. But we all know that the issue is much more complicated than that. While it’s appropriate for individuals and society to protect children, the societal fear of youth sexuality so tragically overshadows rational thinking in so many cases that the result isn’t protection, but censorship and a sexuality information deficit that causes terrible emotional damage to the very youth they claim to be protecting.

The more afraid we are, the more arbitrary rules–like age-based oversimplifications–we try to impose on each other. That’s not a solution–that’s unacceptable. Many people fail to understand this, possibly because of the prevalence of sexual paranoia.

Young or old, no one is safe from it. And in the last decade, the instances of the kinds of cases I mentioned earlier has not slowed. Even more frightening, the irrational age line is changing as panic over youth sexuality increases.

Also in December of 2006, a four year old boy in Waco, Texas was punished with an in-school suspension for hugging a teacher’s aide while boarding the school bus because the aide complained that he had brushed his face against her breast. Whether or not this toddler experienced sexual feelings is not the point; the point is that his expression of it is probably not malicious, and it was CERTAINLY not actually threatening to the teacher’s aide. And if you think this only happens in the Bible Belt, you’re sadly mistaken. In fact, during the school year of 2005-2006 right here in the State of Maryland, 28 kindergartners were suspended for sex offenses, including 15 for sexual harassment.

One writer who blogs at Classically Liberal crystalized what sexual paranoia is doing to our children today:

Once you reach a certain age, having sex with people your own age is normally not considered a crime. The explosion of “youthful sex offenders” is not the result of our kids becoming perverts. It is the result of the law criminalizing what is a normal part of growing up.”

Sexual paranoia incites people to act in paternalistic and contradictory ways. These young people are not the face of society’s worst criminals. Only a decade or so ago, doing what any one of these youth I just described did could very well have been YOU. In fact, if I had not been such an isolated child, it would have been me.

When I was an adolescent, it would have changed my life for the better to be able to be in a public, safe place where people discussed sexuality freely–a place like this event. But I never got that opportunity because places like this didn’t exist. Instead, to get information about sex, bisexuality, and everything else that sexuality was related to in my life–which, as a boy going through puberty, was a lot!–I hid behind the glow of my computer screen in a dark room.

In other words, I was a closeted teenager. I began masturbating at 9 years old, but I was in the closet about that until I turned 15, when I finally talked to a girl who would become my first girlfriend about it. By the way, she was 17, and we gave each other head lots of times. Should she, like Wendy Whitaker, be branded a criminal? In either case, I don’t think so.

Put simply, the closet is not a safe place to be. Whenever you’re afraid to reveal something about yourself, someone else can harm you by revealing that truth. Most teens and younger people, regardless of their sexual orientation, are closeted. They, like I before them, are afraid of discussing their sexuality openly and matter-of-factly. Youth keep any and all sexual activity or sexual curiosity hidden for fear of being punished for it.

In his 1999 talk, Censorship and the Fear of Sexuality, Dr. Marty Klein says:

Children know they’re sexual, so most conclude that they are bad. Unconsciously, kids fear being abandoned or destroyed because of their sexuality. This is not a metaphorical fear–for young children, 100% dependent on the caretaking and good will of their parents, it is a literal fear. In terror, kids learn to hide, deny, repress, and distort their sexuality.

When I was 10, my family got an America Online account. That’s when I discovered the Internet and, of course, pornographic websites. I was afraid to hit the “I am over 18 years of age” button when I wasn’t and yet I did so anyway. I wanted to learn about sexuality from people who were willing to talk about it with me, not engage in it with me.

The uncensored Internet was one of the tools that helped me come out of the closet, that helped me develop a healthy and respectful sexual understanding of myself and of others. It wasn’t the perfect tool, and so today I’m working on making it better, but I fully believe that I would have been a statistic in Ramon Johnson’s suicide article had it not been for the miniscule amount of information about sexuality that I found online.

Sadly, because of the social constructions of power with which sex and age are so inextricably intertwined, the people in power–the adults–often choose censorship to restrict the availability of sexuality information to young people instead of education, all under the guise of protection. But censorship and oppressive information restrictions are not protection, only education is. In the same 1999 talk, Dr. Klein said:

Talk of censorship typically leads to thoughts of “pornography.” But that’s only one aspect of sexual censorship. Other targets include sex education, contraceptive advertising, fiction, sex surveys, the Internet, and public nudity. The Color Purple, Our Bodies Ourselves, and Ms. Magazine, for example, have all been banned from various high school libraries in supposedly liberal California.

The fear of one’s own sexuality with which frightened parents routinely indoctrinate their children in a vicious cycle of adultism and sexual oppression, is far, far more damaging to most children than sex education, contraceptive advertising, or fiction could ever be. And yet it is those avenues of information, even when they’re not sexualized, that are often attacked by sexually paranoid parents and educators on a startlingly routine basis.

Earlier this month, Cory Doctorow’s first young adult novel, Little Brother, received criticism. Was it a badly written book? No. In an article on Locus Online, Cory Doctorow explains:

I didn’t expect[...]that I would receive a torrent of correspondence and entreaties from teachers, students, parents, and librarians who were angry, worried, or upset that Marcus [the main character] loses his virginity about two-thirds of the way through the book. [...T]he sex-scene in the book is anything but explicit. [...] There is no anatomy, no grunts or squeals, no smells or tastes. This isn’t there to titillate. It’s there because it makes plot-sense and story-sense and character-sense for these two characters to do this deed at this time.

[...]

I remain baffled by adults who object to the sex in this book. Not because it’s prudish to object, but because the off-camera sex occurs in the middle of a story that features rioting, graphic torture, and detailed instructions for successful truancy.

When I needed sexuality information as an adolescent my schools, my teachers, my parents, and even my trusted adult friends would not talk to me about it. I suspect they must have been afraid of the very things I sense some people who wish to restrict the access of minors to educational events like these KinkForAll unconferences are afraid of. Finding information about sexuality in public libraries and on the Internet very literally saved my young, questioning, and very isolated life. I don’t want any other young person to go through the isolation and uncertainty I felt about my own sexuality at that age. Do you?

As clinical sexologist Becky Knight said,

It’s kind of amazing to me that so many people wish they had better information and guidance when they were young, but then they fail to provide it for the next generation. Information about sex and relationships is critical for young people if they are going to grow into sexually healthy and happy adults. Some people can find it on their own, but many people suffer from misinformation and misunderstandings that could have been helped by simply getting accurate information earlier on.

Young people today are in the closet because they are not treated equally, because too many adults think the phrase “freedom” and especially “sexual freedom” only apply when someone turns 16, or 18, or whatever the ages of consent or majority, which both vary wildly across regions of the world, happens to kick in.

In fact, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik says that the younger children are, the more morally they tend to behave. (Skip to 57 seconds into the video.) Take, for example, the case of 10 year old Arkansas resident Will Phillips, who made national headlines a few weeks ago when he refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in school (you know, the one that ends with liberty and justice for all) until gay and lesbian people have equal rights to marry whomever they love, just as heterosexual people do.

Will recently appeared on CNN for an interview alongside his father, Jay Phillips. When asked if his son was prepared for the media attention, Mr. Phillips said his son saw it as an opportunity to raise awareness: He felt that just because he’s ten years old doesn’t mean he doesn’t have opinions, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have rights, and doesn’t mean he can’t make a difference.

So it seems to me that young people are often painfully aware of fundamental human rights and have an intellectual and moral capacity as keenly developed as any of the healthiest adults. I submit to you today that freedom is not something that we can put to a vote, nor is it something that someone should be made to wait 18 years for, because they should have it from the moment they enter into this world. And this is not a new idea.

The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights says (paraphrased):

Every man, woman, and child on Earth is born free and equal in dignity and rights. [...] Everyone is entitled to the rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights regardless of age[...]. You have the right to live in freedom and safety. Nobody has the right to treat you as their slave. The law is the same for everyone. You have the right to think what you want and say what you like, to organize peacefully, [and] to take part in your country’s political affairs. The society in which you live should help you to develop. Education should strive to promote peace and understanding among all people.

Here’s some food for thought: there’s a word for minors who are legally able to make their own choices. That word is ‘emancipated.’ In other words, most minors are not emancipated. This word might sound familiar, since it’s in the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed African-American slaves from the legal control of their owners across the United States. On that note, imagine what kind of priority adults might make education and childcare if school children could vote.

You might be thinking to yourself, ‘This is too much, too radical, too dangerous, too risky.’ Yes, it is a lot, it is radical, it is dangerous, and it is risky. But it is not merely possible, it is necessary. We will not have a world free of sexism, classism, racism, or religious persecution if we do not also empower our children to actually live a life of equal dignity and rights from the moment they join us here.

In order for our children and ourselves to live free of fear, we must eradicate this pandemic of sexual paranoia and its symptoms of sexual adultism. And we can, because there are enough people around who want to make the world a better place. You can be the cure this world needs.

On a blog post that I wrote while trying to come up with this presentation, one commenter said this:

Whenever I think about sex education and young people, I’m left with my persistent conviction that lack of real education about sex and relationships nearly got me raped at fourteen. This…leaves me rather emotional about the subject.

I’m typing this with my three month old daughter asleep in my lap.

This also leaves me rather emotional about the subject.

I need to know how to do for her better than was done for me.

With that in mind, I challenge you–each and every one of you listening to me speak, whether you’re hearing me in person today or you’re watching this presentation from a recording a month from now, a year from now, or a decade from now–I challenge you to take it upon yourself to be an educational hero and make accurate, rational, nonjudgmental sex education a real priority. You can do it by pressuring your school districts, politicians, and teachers to promote body-positive materials in classrooms. You can do it by sharing a link to a sex-positive article or posting a tweet about this talk. Help one person–just one person–to make something better for themselves than was done for you.

Thank you very much.

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Saturday, November 14, 2009

Online reputation management for sex bloggers; when a tweet won’t do

Category labels: Technology, Vanilla life, Writing and blogging

On Twitter today, @nellodee and @wilhelminawang had a conversation in which @wilheminawang expressed desire to come “out” (of the closet) with regards to the sexual aspects of her life, but also expressed concern that the result of doing so would be socially damaging. She said she feared that coming out would mean Internet searches for her real name would result in uncovering naked pictures of her. Since being naked on the Internet isn’t the whole of the image she wants to portray to the public, she was understandably concerned about coming out.

This is a concern that I hear expressed time and time again among people who are involved with any number of cultural issues, be it alternative sexuality or even just starting a job hunt while you’re still employed. It all boils down to wanting to keep some information private without necessarily keeping it a secret from absolutely everyone; you can’t actually go on an interview without your interviewer knowing you are looking for a job, but you also don’t want your current boss to know that you went on an interview. What to do? There are a couple issues all wrapped up into one here and, since I can’t tackle them all in this one blog post, I’ll only focus on some.

In both the example of the job searcher and the alternative sexuality practitioner, there is the same notion of a “closet,” of being “out” about some piece of information they would like to have some control over. But as with most things in reality, things are not always so cut-and-dry as we might wish they were; the closet isn’t something you are either in or out of. The closet is not a binary.

(As an aside, at KinkForAll Washington DC next weekend, the lovely lady at FollowsTheSun.com is going to be giving a presentation called Wandering Out of the Closet – Stories from a slow trip Out, which I suspect will be her take on this issue, or a similar one. If you’re in or near Washington, DC next week I strongly encourage you to come to the free KinkForAll Washington DC unconference and attend that presentation.)

I’m an example of someone who is completely out and transparent. Google my real name and you’ll get some information about my sexuality work. You’ll also probably find a link to this blog, and maybe even some naked photos within a few clicks. (This is left as an exercise to the reader). However, since I’m much more than a sexual organ, you’ll also get a ton of other information, such as my web development work, my presentations regarding culture, technology, and society, and a range of other things.

I chose to live a transparent life, to come “out” because I believe being out is a safer place to be than being in the closet. Make no mistake, I’m no altruist; I do what I do because doing it makes my situation better than not doing it. The reason I am so strongly supportive of other people choosing to live an open life is solely because coming out of the closet is a vaccine against blackmail, emotional abuse, and shame. It can be a scary process if you’ve been living in the closet for a long time, but I wholeheartedly believe it’s worth it. Being out gives you control over how people find and see you. Otherwise, you give up that control to someone else.

But the fundamental question @wilheminawang had remains: how do you make sure that your non-kink stuff shows up on google before the kink stuff?

The answer, actually, is stupidly simple: I create more “non-kink,” non-sex content on the Internet than I create sex content. As a result, when you look for me on Google, you’ll find the amalgamation of everything I put online, not just sex stuff. In other words, creating an image of yourself on the Internet is no different from doing so anywhere else. If you present a certain way most of the time, that’s the image most people will have of you most of the time.

Could you find the naked photos of me by doing a google search if you tried? Absolutely, but notice that those naked photos aren’t the ones that show up first. Why not? Because there are more photos of me online in which I’m not naked than photos in which I am naked. Sure, if you were looking for my naked pics and actively filtered out all that other content I produce in which I am (gasp!) wearing clothes, you’d find them. Otherwise, to find them, you’ll actually have to sit through page after page after page of Google search results. And, humor me, when was the last time you had the patience to look beyond the second page of results when idly searching, again?

I realize this is painfully anti-climactic and not very stunning, but it’s the truth. If the only content you produce on the Internet is writing about the orgasms you have or don’t have, or how you got them or gave some to someone else, are you really that shocked to learn that’s what’s going to come up when someone googles you? Likewise, are you surprised to learn that I also have a day job, that I’m interested in more than just writing about sexuality, and that my online presence reflects these other interests, which you can find when you google my name, too?

You shouldn’t be because, just like you, I’m much more than a sexual organ. I’m a thinking, feeling, self-empowered human being, one with opinions and experiences that range far, far beyond the narrow chasm of the (exciting yet superficial) mechanical aspects of human sexual responses. Therefore, I would be doing all of you a grave disservice if the only part of myself that I made visible were the details of my physiological sexual responses. Moreover, I would be doing myself a disservice, too.

Unlike many “sex bloggers,” I don’t often write play-by-play descriptions about what happens when I have sex with lovers, or about how many fingers or dildos or whatever was inside this hole on that body or what. The only value of such things to me is to relive a pleasant encounter or, for my readers, to vicariously experience it. And while that’s all fine and dandy, it’s a pathetically insignificant portion of who I am as a person. And—guess what—Google knows that and reflects that because I told the Internet about all of me.

It’s not an accident that when you google for me, the first result you get is for my homepage. It’s also not an accident that my homepage has nothing to do with this blog. It doesn’t even have the word “sexuality” on it. My résumé is also pretty high on the Google search result pages, and again that’s no mistake. I pimp my résumé under my real name stronger than I pimp this blog under that name. Why? Because I’m actively thinking about how people find and learn about me. Regardless of whether you are out or not, you should be thinking about this, too.

This kind of thinking about one’s own presentation is extremely important because it’s the most valuable currency in the world today. Tomorrow’s money is not going to be printed on paper or plastic, but rather on the content you produce and make available to the public: if it isn’t already, your blog is going to be more valuable than your job. As telecommunications technologies continue to shrink distances, globalization will continue to drive our value-creation systems towards something a lot of people are calling a reputation economy (although personally I’m not a huge fan of that phrase). In fact, an industry is beginning to form around this concept, called online reputation management.

Many people who blog about fringe cultural issues like alternative sexuality are on the forefront of grappling with this transition. That’s what’s really at the core of @wilheminawang’s question when she asked how I managed to keep a professional presence on Google and yet still be completely out. Folks like her are often frightened of connecting their real identity with their alternate online persona, yet it’s the marriage of those two identities which is where the real value in tomorrow’s currency lies for them, just as it did for me. When I merged my two online identities, the (not-quite-)sex blogger and the web developer, I suddenly found myself making more money, getting more job offers, and, what’s more, they were the kinds of jobs I could feel comfortable in! It was a huge win for me, and possibly the best thing I ever did for my career and safety.

Let me be clear: I don’t think merging one’s identities is something everyone must do. There’s a time and a place for everything, including this. But I do think that if you do it mindfully, the benefits radically outweigh any possible concerns you might have. That being said, if you choose not to come out on the Internet as “the real you,” you need to understand that you are never truly anonymous. Everything you write can and will be traced back to you one day. The greatest danger of the Internet, in my opinion, isn’t the prevalence of porn or the potential for silly cat pictures, but the illusion of anonymity it gives to laypeople.

So in conclusion of this relatively rambly, quickly thrown-together blog post, to come out online you need to understand that Internet search engines don’t rank the content you produce by any scale other than its relevance to the search phrase. If the only content you produce online—content that, whether you know it or not, will never be fully anonymous and will be available forever—is going to be about the sex you have, then people are going to think of you through the only narrow, single lens you’ve given them to look at you with. If, on the other hand, you present yourself to the world wholly and authentically unashamed, then people will be far more likely to see you for who you are as an authentic person.

It’s critical that you take responsibility for your own image, and that you maintain whatever balance you find appropriate for the kind of content you produce in the world. Since I do more non-sex stuff on the Internet than I do sex stuff, the sex stuff gets pushed down underneath the things I create and promote with more impact, such as my web development work, or my social commentary essays regarding culture and society. Furthermore, even within the sexuality content I create, only a fraction of that content (of which this post is a part) is about explicit sexual activity. If you’ve been a long-time reader of this blog, you’ll notice that while you will occasionally find me writing about sexual experiences, not even those posts are devoid of introspective thought, reflective analysis, or social commentary.

In other words, the vast majority of stuff I choose to put online has lasting value. It might as well, because remember, it’s going to stay online forever. Are you sure your blog is representing you the way you want to be seen? If not, maybe it’s time to write about something else for a change.

Additional resources

Unsurprisingly, there’s actually a whole ton of information about this topic available online. If this is something that concerns you, I encourage you to read the following resources:

  • Managing your reputation through search results – most of what I discuss in this post is basically referencing the third point in this blog post from Google, “proactively publish information.”
  • Online Reputation Management: 16 Free Tools – this is a listing of online services and other tools that can help you monitor references to you from across the Internet. I use a number of these services, which I refer to collectively as “my Internet radar.”
  • Bad Reputation: Doing Damage Control On Your Internet Profile – This recent post basically reiterates a lot of what I said, citing that [y]our best bet is to make sure that there’s lots of good information about you on the internet. It’s also got some practical how-to tips thrown in for good measure.

If you’ve got some more links to resources for this sort of stuff, please share them in the comments, and I’ll update this list with your suggestions.

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Sunday, November 1, 2009

On Youth, Sexuality, Education, and Your Fears

Category labels: Community, Generation gap, Kink events, Personal history, Politics of sex, Vanilla life

In just 3 weeks time, on November 21st, the sexuality education, health, and rights conference series that many people, including me, have been working on for months is going to be held at the Montgomery County Executive Office Building, a 5 minute walk from the Rockville Metro station in the Washington, DC metro area. I’m totally psyched about it because, thanks to the incredible work of Nikolas Coukouma and numerous generous donors, we have a large cafeteria space in a public building.

Being in a public venue is a big deal because most sexuality communities are extremely afraid of using public resources for doing their work. Few that I know about in the sex-positive sphere think to use community resources, instead choosing to segregate themselves from the rest of their local community. I think that’s supremely unfortunate, and it totally fails to send a message of inclusion, acceptance, and diversity that’s so central to (among other things) sexual health.

The other reason having a public venue for the conference, which we call the KinkForAll Washington DC “unconference,” is a big deal is because it legally solidifies the “open to the public” nature of the event. As it is a conference that invites anyone with the desire to learn or with something to contribute to attend and speak at, KinkForAll has always been and should always be 100% free and open to the public. We should be striving to create as public and diverse an atmosphere as possible, even in privately-owned spaces (such as the previous venues of LGBT community centers and universities).

Sadly, it turns out that even in otherwise unbiased communities, many people are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that certain other people might want or should be able to participate. In particular, although many people seem to be championing the unconference’s “open to the public” nature, some of these same people have voiced strong concern over the possible presence of minors. Others have gone so far as to wish to restrict the presence of youth citing “inappropriateness” and fears that access to sexuality information could be traumatic.

I believe these are well-intentioned people, but feel that their desire to censor information from minors or create restrictions that hinder the accessibility of some information to them is adultist behavior. Such behavior, while likely spawned from understandable fears, encourages closeted behavior. Projecting a mentality of fear onto young people does them a severe disservice.

When I was an adolescent, it would have changed my life for the better to be able to be in a public, safe place where people discussed sexuality freely, where I didn’t need to hide behind the glow of my computer screen in a dark room to get information about sex, bisexuality, and everything else that sexuality touches. I was a closeted teenager. Today, most teens and younger people are similarly closeted. Indeed, most adults still are, too!

When I was in the closet, I was being secretive, I felt fearful, and I had few to zero avenues for acquiring accurate information that could have helped me live a dramatically happier, more self-sufficient life. Put simply, the closet is not a safe place to be. In a conversation I had with David Phillips, co-founder of the Rainbow Response Coalition fighting against intimate partner violence in the Washington, DC metro area LGBT communities, David notes this startling point about the closet:

If you consider that intimate partner violence, when they look at statistics in a large population, race isn’t a determining factor, income isn’t a determining factor. But what [does] pop up as determining factors: disability is a predisposing factor, and then I believe that the closet is weighing more heavily because that is one unique form of violence that’s used against LGBT people that isn’t available to be used against heterosexual folks, is, “I’m going to out you. I’m going to tell your family. I’m going to tell your friends. So shut up.” […] It could be, y’know, kink interest, for what it’s worth, but just some characteristic that’s kept under wraps becomes a source of strength for the abuser.

(Skip to about 1:07:22 in the audio recording of the conversation to hear the quote.)

Indeed, since information and knowledge is power, censorship can be a weapon. Becky Knight summed up the importance of making sexuality information accessible to youth better than anyone:

It’s kind of amazing to me that so many people wish they had better information and guidance when they were young, but then they fail to provide it for the next generation. Information about sex and relationships is critical for young people if they are going to grow into sexually healthy and happy adults. Some people can find it on their own, but many people suffer from misinformation and misunderstandings that could have been helped by simply getting accurate information earlier on.

Fortunately, human beings are blessed (and cursed) with an ability to do something truly extraordinary: we can imagine ourselves in a situation better than the one we find ourselves in. We can hope. Despite the obviously gendered language, George Bernard Shaw seems to have understood this when he said:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

I’ve been obsessed with this idea for as long as I can remember. For instance, although many people thought it was “unreasonable” of me, as a 2nd grader, to insist that traditional schooling was wildly inappropriate for my education, I have always thought and continue to believe that vocalizing my opinion was the most natural, obvious, reasonable thing in the world for me to do. I campaigned (for nearly 10 years) to convince my legal guardians and other adults that I would be better served if I spent my time learning on my own, out of school. Eventually, with no small effort, I dropped out, and every concern the caring but misguided adults had about me was proven unrealistic. I never “got into trouble” with drugs or gangs or violence, I became financially self-supporting while still a teenager, and—still without a GED—I’m now in a higher tax bracket than my parents are. (The price of “success,” I guess. Oh well.)

Why was it so difficult for the adults in my life to trust me when I assured them, “Don’t worry, I’ll be okay,” or to give me a straight answer when I asked, “Why can’t I study what I want to learn?” Why was my input so cavalierly dismissed? Was it because I was 7 years old? Maybe it was because they didn’t believe a 7 year old was capable of imagining himself in a better situation than the one he was in. At least, surely not better than a situation they could imagine for him, right? Wrong. Tragically wrong.

In a recent blog post on youth engagement at schools, Adam Fletcher writes:

The evidence that education systems across the United States are devoid of student involvement in decision-making is obvious to any young person or adult who considers themselves an ally of youth. […T]he belief that students cannot make decisions for themselves is as much a hindrance as the belief that students cannot make decisions for schools at large.

Here’s some food for thought: there’s a word for minors who are legally able to make their own choices. That word is ‘emancipated.’ In other words, most minors are not emancipated. This word might sound familiar, since it’s in the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed African-American slaves from the legal control of their owners across the United States.

When I think about this, I can’t help but be reminded of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says (paraphrased),

Every man, woman, and child on Earth is born free and equal in dignity and rights. We have reason and conscious and should be friendly towards one another. Everyone is entitled to the rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights regardless of age[…]. You have the right to live in freedom and safety. Nobody has the right to treat you as their slave. The law is the same for everyone. You have the right to think what you want and say what you like, to organize peacefully, [and] to take part in your country’s political affairs. The society in which you live should help you to develop. Education should strive to promote peace and understanding among all people.

(Here’s the original text of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.)

People who have not yet reached the age of majority, which varies wildly across regions, cultures, and governments, by the way, are arguably the single most disenfranchised group of human beings. In America, and in most if not all countries in the world, they have little or no legal standing, protections, or rights. Just for a moment, imagine what kind of priority adults might make education and childcare if schoolchildren could vote.

My struggle for a voice to educate myself in the way I saw best is not even worthy of a footnote when compared to the overwhelming injustices some other young people face, but it’s a personal reminder that I was once considered incapable and unreasonable thanks only to the inherent characteristic of my age at the time—something I was powerless to change.

At the same time as all of that was going on in my life, when I turned 9, I entered puberty and began to masturbate. As unfamiliar as masturbation was, I was largely well-prepared for it because I had spent countless hours at school surreptitiously reading anatomy textbooks during my Judaic Studies courses (and getting in trouble for doing so). By then, I could not only name most components of human genitalia, but could also describe the human sexual response cycle from start to finish.

I dared not speak about these things to anyone, however, because all it would do was get me in trouble for not paying more attention in school during class. Then, when I was 10, my family got an America Online account. I discovered the Internet and, of course, pornographic websites.

I was afraid to hit the “I am over 18 years of age” button when I wasn’t and yet I did so anyway. I remember learning about the public BDSM scene in New York when I was 10 and wishing I could go. I couldn’t, of course, and so I waited for 8 years—consciously, silently waiting for 8 years. I finally went out to the public BDSM scene when I was 18, and I was terrified. The places where I ended up were not, in fact, places where I think I would have been safe as a teenager. Indeed, I question how safe I was as an “adult” there. Frankly, I hesitate to return to some of those places to this day, and I’m 25 now.

A KinkForAll unconference, however, is a place I think that, had it existed and I knew about it when I was a teenager, I would have come out to because it is public, because it is safe, because it is expressly not eroticized.

So it was not so long ago when I was banned from sexuality communities for being too young. I wanted to learn about sexuality from people who were willing to talk about it with me, not engage in it with me. I wanted to learn more about myself so much that I devoured every resource I could get my hands on—not an easy feat (even in the 90’s) considering how censored everything is, especially where younger people are concerned, and it’s only getting more difficult as filtering technologies “improve.”

I fully believe that I would have been a suicide case had it not been for the miniscule amount of information about sexuality that I found. As Ramon Johnson points out in his article about LGBT suicide,

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth are up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers, according to the Massachusetts 2006 Youth Risk Survey. A 2007 San Francisco State University Chavez Center Institute study shows that lgbt and questioning youth who come from a rejecting family are up to nine times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. And for every completed suicide by a young person, it is estimated that 100 to 200 attempts are made (2003 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey).

(By the way, if you or someone you know is feeling down right now, please read and share Kate Bornstein’s Hello, Cruel World Lite.)

I desperately needed sexuality information that I could relate to, that told me I was not alone, that told me there were people I could speak with, that gave me hope that, one day, I could reach out to people who cared a damn about what I was feeling and who could share their own feelings and opinions with me. I needed someone to do that for me when I was 12, and I never got it.

I never got it because talking about it was taboo. My schools, my teachers, my parents, and even my trusted adult friends would not talk to me about it. I suspect they must have been afraid of the very things I sense some people who wish to restrict the access of minors to the educational KinkForAll unconferences are afraid of. It was that fear of theirs that almost killed me. Finding information about sexuality in public libraries and on the Internet very literally saved my young, questioning, and very isolated life. I don’t want any other young person to go through the isolation and uncertainty I felt about my own sexuality that I did at that age.

Like the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights implies, I believe that safe and free access to accurate, non-judgmental information about human sexuality and sexual freedom—or about anything of public interest, for that matter—is a fundamental human right, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic class, educational level, or age. That’s why I strongly believe that we need to make sexuality information freely accessible to young people. Adults must bear in mind that youth are a crucial group of people for whom education and access to quality, reliable information is perhaps more paramount for the future than anything else.

Knee-jerk and fearful reactions to young people’s potential exposure to sexuality material is often vastly more damaging than the exposure itself. Furthermore, a distinction must be drawn between the erotic and the educational. In fact, most current laws clearly recognize this distinction and expressly preclude material having a bona fide scientific, educational, governmental, artistic, news, or other similar justification from legal prosecution. It’s a sorry state of affairs that pornography has become the largest source of sexuality information due mostly to the absence of real, widespread, public sex education.

The result of such an information deficit about sex coupled with fearful reactions about filling it are youth that aren’t going to be able to feel safe exploring the world, their relationships with friends when they are young, and their romantic relationships when they grow older. As Cory Silverberg recently wrote in his guide to talking to kids about pornography,

Good sex education isn’t about forcing one agenda or another on your kids. It’s about being responsive to questions asked and anticipating what kinds of information your kids might need given their environment.

If I could only give you one reason why you should at least think about talking to your kids about pornography it’s that, if statistics are to be believed, they are likely to encounter some [porn] before they reach an age where they’ll be able to critically understand what they are seeing.

I wouldn’t recommend raising the topic of pornography out of the blue. But if you have a child who is already online or watches TV, or you have any pornography in your home (no matter how well hidden you think it is) I do think it behooves you to prepare to talk about pornography, and think ahead about how you want to talk about.

Concerns that exposure to pornography could be traumatic for people—regardless of age—who are not able to critically understand what they are seeing are not unfounded. Of course, the same can be said about exposure to electricity (“Don’t stick your hand in the wall outlet!”) or heat (“Don’t touch the stove when it’s on!”) or crossing the street (“Always hold my hand when you cross!”) or a bazillion other things that could potentially cause harm. However, in all of these cases, censorship does not provide protection, education does. By the same token, actively restricting access to sexuality information (not porn, but sexual education resources—there’s a difference) from people who seek it, again regardless of age, is like forcing them to wear a blindfold while crossing a highway.

How would you feel if someone did that to you? That’s how I felt throughout my entire childhood and teenage years, first in school when I was a boy, then at the restriction of sexuality information when I was going through puberty. Why did the adults in my life not see that what they thought they were doing “for my own good” was actually a painful and damaging experience for me? That when they saw fit to decree what I “needed” they were actually disrespectfully disregarding my input about my own personhood, a personhood that, even as a young boy, was extremely well-established.

Why? Adults routinely speak on behalf of young people without any input from them. Again, why? Why did the adults, institutions, and public systems in my life deny my rights to better my own education? Was it “unreasonable” of me to expect better treatment than that? Did they think I simply couldn’t learn on my own? That I “needed” their specific brand of structure? That smells a little One True Way™ to me.

And, even more upsetting, why should things feel that way for so many people, of all ages, about many topics, in countless places around the world? Can’t we do better than this? Don’t you also hope, as I do, that one day we will do better?

Thankfully, the other extraordinary thing about human beings is that we have the capability to turn our ideas, our hopes, and our dreams into realities. In 2006, high school student Miranda Elliot campaigned with 50 other young adults to reform public sex education in Chicago public schools, and they did. Mel Rose Dingal, young activist participating in the 2009 Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health Rights, successfully changed the conference’s official statement regarding youth, creating one of the strongest youth statements calling policy makers from governments, private sectors, and civil society to actively address sexual rights and reproductive health of young people as a global goal.

The KinkForAll unconferences are not youth sexual rights events because, as an unconference, KinkForAll has no specific sexuality focus. Whoever participates are the right people. Whatever the topics are, they are the right ones. Neither myself nor, as far as I know, anyone else in the KinkForAll community wishes to recruit any specific individual to the unconference.

All I want is to maintain the accessibility of the event so it is available to any member of the human race who wants to participate. Again, KinkForAll always has been and should always remain 100% free and open to the public. All that being said, you can bet on my giving a presentation at KinkForAll Washington DC about youth sexual rights, because it’s an extremely important topic not only to me personally, but I think also to our children’s future.

If you’re interested in helping out, please consider crossposting the message below on your blog, sending it to any email lists you belong to that accept such messages, tweeting about it, or just telling a friend you think might be interested in checking it out. Thank you.

PLEASE COPY AND CROSSPOST THIS MESSAGE FREELY.

KinkForAll is an ad-hoc educational unconference about the convergence of sexuality with the rest of life for anyone and everyone. It is 100% free and open to the public. Anyone with the desire to learn or with something to contribute is welcome and invited to participate.

Vitals
======
What: A free and highly social day of sexuality education and discussion.
Why: To inspire a creative, interactive and open environment where everyone feels comfortable talking and learning about all things that sexuality relates to in their lives.
When: November 21st, 2009 at 10:30 AM
Where: Montgomery County Executive Office Building at 101 Monroe Street, Rockville, MD (5 min walk from Rockville Metro station)
Who: Everyone
How much: FREE (as in beer as well as freedom)

Details
=======

KinkForAll is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people of all persuasions to share and learn in an open environment. It is a fast-paced event with discussions, presentations, and interaction from all participants. (It is inspired by the BarCamp community.)

ANYONE WITH SOMETHING TO CONTRIBUTE OR WITH THE DESIRE TO LEARN IS WELCOME AND INVITED TO JOIN. When you attend, be prepared to share with others. When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

A KinkForAll is a special kind of gathering because there are no spectators, only participants. Attendees must give a talk or a presentation, help with one, or otherwise contribute in some way to support the event. This is called sharing and we like it. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen—there are no pre-scheduled presentations or keynote addresses. The people present at the event will select the presentations they want to see.

Anyone can lead a session, on any topic related to sexuality. You do not necessarily have to teach a new skill or idea. You might share an experience, facilitate a discussion, or read a poem. The goal is to start a conversation, make connections (and maybe even friends), and exchange knowledge. Presentations promoting specific commercial products or companies are discouraged.

Learn more about what to expect at
http://wiki.kinkforall.org/WhatToExpect

Learn more about the event guidelines at
http://wiki.kinkforall.org/TheRulesOfKinkForAll

This activity is not sponsored by, associated with, or endorsed by Montgomery County Public Schools or Montgomery County Government.

Get Involved
============

We need your help in spreading the word. Please help by participating.

Here’s how:

1. Get excited by reading fellow participants’ topic ideas on
http://wiki.kinkforall.org/KinkForAllWashingtonDC
2. Add your name or handle to the list of participants
3. Join the mailing list and introduce yourself by emailing
kinkforall@googlegroups.com
4. Show up!

Still have questions? Read the Frequently Asked Questions at
http://wiki.kinkforall.org/FrequentlyAskedQuestions

or email kinkforall@googlegroups.com for more details.

KinkForAll Online
==============

Participate online before the event at your favorite social networking web site:

Homepage: http://wiki.KinkForAll.org
Google: http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall
Twitter: http://twitter.com/KinkForAll
Identica: http://identi.ca/kinkforall
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/KinkForAll/40066342762
Fetlife: http://fetlife.com/groups/2962

All organizational efforts are coordinated in public via the mailing list. Join for free and help turn ideas into realities!

http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall

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Monday, September 14, 2009

Freeing Sexuality Information at KinkForAll Boston

Category labels: Community, Generation gap, Kink events, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Technology, Vanilla life, Writing and blogging

This past weekend, I had a fantastic time participating in KinkForAll Boston, the first KinkForAll event held outside of New York City. By far, my favorite part about it was the incredibly astute discussions everyone was having about diversity and the importance of building bridges between sexuality-centric information and other kinds of information. I believe this topic to be so important that I changed gears from my planned presentation of “The Internet, Porn, Minors, and You,” in which I intended to discuss making sexuality safe and accessible to young people, to dedicate my presentation to the topic of spreading sexuality information for free. (I paid the price for this in lack of sleep the night before….)

Obviously, since I think this topic is so important, I want to share it with you here. The video below is a recording of my presentation, which I titled “Freeing Sexuality Information: Why you can change the world by talking about yourself.” All of the materials used in the presentation are Creative Commons licensed, so you can also redistribute the presentation by downloading and republishing it—and I strongly encourage you to do so.

Freeing Sexuality Information – KinkForAll Boston from maymay on Vimeo.

Download the presentation files here:

Anyway, for an ill-publicized and ill-fated event, having lost our venue only 8 days prior to the unconference, KinkForAll Boston was a remarkable success. Some of my favorite moments included:

  • Late in the day, a participant who originally wore an orange “do not photograph me” sticker on his name tag removed it because, and I quote, he said “I think [doing this is] very important.” That, right there, blew me away.
  • Our amazing venue heroes, Liz of the Boston University Women’s Resource Center (BUWRC) came up to me after the event was over and said, “This was amazing. I learned so much.” She then told me she’d love to have some of the speakers at the BUWRC to give hour-long talks because “there was so much more we couldn’t get at in just 20 minutes.” I encouraged her to reach out to any speaker she found interesting by emailing them; everyone who’s willing to be emailed has already posted their email address on the KinkForAll Boston event homepage.
  • Discussions during lunch time focused on the differences and mis-uses of the language of our sexuality, which reminded me of an extension of KinkForAll New York City 2’s presentation by Seth called “Language In The Kinky Community”. At one point during the discussion, someone said, “Wow, this is so interesting. There should be a presentation about this!” And low-and-behold, Heliotrope had already signed up on the schedule grid to do a presentation on that very topic! (Video of her presentation is now availableis forthcoming.)
  • In the morning, Boston Boy gave a great presentation about the legalities of consensual sadomasochistic behavior called “Assault, Battery, and You” but he was uncomfortable with any recording so we never recorded it. Later, after he listened to me giving my presentation, he approached me and said that now that he’d thought about it more, he wished we had recorded his presentation after all. (I do too—it was fantastic.) It was very gratifying to see this motif of people becoming more and more comfortable—and more brave—about sharing what they know in public spheres after they see me doing exactly that.
  • (There were many more moments like this, and I might update this list with the others as I recall them.)

My sincerest thanks go out to everyone who participated in KinkForAll Boston, regardless of whether you were there in person or simply joined the conversation on the Internet. And on that note, if you did participate in any way (either in-person or online), please take a moment to help the unorganizers out by filling out the KinkForAll Boston participant questionnaire.

Following is the full transcript of my presentation. Again, please feel free to republish this anywhere you like as long as you link back to this post.

Thank you all for coming to another KinkForAll unconference! Although this will be the 3rd event of its kind, it’s the 1st one that’s made it outside New York City, which I think is a bit of a milestone. I’m going to take the opportunity in my presentation to take a brief look at the current state of sexuality information in the world with you and encourage you to peer through the looking glass with me about where we might be going with such things in the future.

What does information about sexuality look like today? How do people get it, what does it contain–or exclude–and how do people share it? Today, we are interacting with two extremely different dimensions of sex information. In one dimension, a recent creation, huge amounts of information is freely available and ranges the gamut of different sexual activities, interests, and influences. In the other dimension, however, information about sex in any form is extremely restricted and is even dangerous to have, speak about, or reference.

What are these dimensions of “sex data”? There are a number of facets, but the most practical way to look at the situation is—unsurprisingly—through the lens of the Internet. On the Internet, many people do things with relatively little fear. In other realms, such as at in-person gatherings like this one, many of these people who might otherwise be willing to reach outside their comfort zone online are much more apprehensive, much more fearful. This invokes an obvious question: why? For the answer, let’s first look at mass-market sexuality information.

Arguably the most influential sex educator in the history of the world is Oprah Winfrey. Sadly, however, her pop-culture popularity belies her ignorance of sexuality, which so strongly focuses on female victimization that one of her recent TV shows warned of “graphic content that is suitable for mature audiences only” because of its depiction of a diagram from a high school biology textbook showing the anatomical location of the vagina. Evidently, according to Oprah, simply being told where the vagina is located on the human body is “graphic,” and requires warnings.

Oprah’s discomfort with the very basics of sexual anatomy is disturbing, but there are other, even more frightening examples of sexual unease in the American mainstream. In fact, some people participating in this event have been criticized on national television by these more evangelical fear mongers. It’s tempting to make things personal, but doing so is ultimately tangential to the point of this talk, which is about freeing “sex data.”

What all of these prominent people have in common is that they are widely regarded as experts. As experts, they have a certain amount of influence over many of the things they discuss, and they are using that influence to reinforce the set of standards for sexual data that exist today. Let’s look at these standards.

One such standard is the law. Recently, right here in Massachusetts, Kathi-Anne Reinstein (your state representative) has introduced a bill making it a crime for anyone over 60 to pose nude…for film or photo. Moreover, the law also criminalizes nude or sexual photography of the physically disabled…regardless of mental capacity. Apparently, in Massachusetts [if this bill passes,] you lose control over your sexuality when you lose control over your legs. Furthermore, as many of you are aware, in many states it’s illegal for two people who are recognized by the government as being of the same sex to marry. That’s a standard from which many of our society’s systems, both social and otherwise, draws data. Changing the law changes other systems.

Another such standard of sexual data (all data, really) is the dictionary. A common definition of the word “pretty” that most dictionaries publish is: “pleasing by delicacy or grace; not imposing; [such as] ‘pretty song’; ‘pretty room’; ‘pretty girl’”. Imagine what would change in our use of the English language in reference to “girl” and “boy” if the dictionary would have instead given, “pretty person” as one of its examples.

One final example I’d like to show you is the case of UK-based Filament Magazine who, by way of responding to reader feedback, planned to include a photo set of an aroused man in their second (September) issue. … [Their] printers, however, refused to go along with the publication, forcing Filament to do business elsewhere. Amidst the plethora of top-shelf magazines featuring scantily clad and open-legged women, the struggles faced by Filament highlight a deeply entrenched sexism: men can look at women but women cannot look at men. In other words, we are still being told what we are allowed to view, what we are allowed to think about, and what we are allowed to want.

This holds true even if the things we see aren’t the things we actually want. It turns out that our own notions of ideals aren’t what we’re told they are. In fact, in Britain, national polls show that men’s preferences for women’s bodies are several sizes larger than most think. The most profound truth, one Oprah consistently neglects to discuss, is that, human experience itself is diverse. In the age of the Internet, everyone gets a place to say what it is they want. No one can deny it, and no one can nay-say it: you are the only expert, and have the only reliable resource in knowing your own desires—yourself.

So what does all this have to do with freeing sexuality information? These standards, the law, mainstream publishing, and the Internet, all affect the availability not only of information about sexuality, but of information about every topic imaginable. Information is like a network, a web of connections from one topic to another. Like the Internet, it’s possible to get at any piece of information from any other piece of information near instantaneously. But we can’t just teleport there, we have to build the bridges, and make the links, ourselves.

Granted, that’s a big job, and we don’t have a whole lot of good, free resources to begin with. But it’s not impossible. Let me tell you a story: Tired and hungry after a long trek in the wilderness, a traveler approaches a village. She tries to barter for food, but the villagers don’t want to give any away because of the famine they’re suffering. So the traveler takes out her cookware, boils some water in a pot, and drops a stone in it. Curious, a villager asks what she is doing. “I’m cooking stone soup,” she says, “It’s delicious, but it would taste even better with a little bit of garnish.” Comfortable giving up only “a little bit of garnish” to help the hungry traveler out, the curious villager adds it to the soup. Another villager walks by inquiring about the pot, and the traveler again mentions her stone soup which hasn’t reached its full potential yet. So the second villager adds a little bit of seasoning to help. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient. Finally, a delicious and nourishing (not to mention large) pot of soup is enjoyed by all.

As you may have guessed, this old story is an analogy to the current state of sex information. You and I are hungry travelers—the outliers. We see a better world but don’t have the ingredients to make it a reality by ourselves. So we start talking—to ourselves, at first, in open, public online diaries (“blogs”). Then other people get curious about us and What It Is That We Do. We build a small community, one in which people are excellent to one another, where we can build tools to share what we know and to keep us safe, made possible because other curious people have brought their own information and pooled it with ours.

This is the future of sex information. Open, honest, and freely available. Non-commercial. Today, Human sexuality, and especially accurate nonjudgmental sex information has [been] commodified, locked down and made virtually inaccessible by interests ranging from politics to exclusivity agreements—sex ed DRM, if you will. So to build the bridges, to make the links, you, the experts, need to start sharing what you know. Not just about sex, but everything that has to do with your life. Everything that touches your life can also touch your sexuality, because information is a web of links.

I don’t know what we’ll be able to create with that kind of freedom. No one does. But one thing is certain: the only way to create it is to free sexuality information.

Thank you for listening. Thank you even more for creating.

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