Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

—Ray Bradbury

They say 2012 is the year of armageddon? Let's bring on the ruckus, I say!

Earlier today, December 31^st, 2011, I filed my thirty-day notice of intent to vacate my San Francisco apartment.

On the one hand, I simply can’t financially afford my little studio in the Tenderloin any longer. No, I don’t have another apartment lined up, and no, I don’t intend to find one. Instead, I’m about to leap off this cliff and grow my wings on the way down. Yes, I’m scared. And, yes, I’ll be okay.

On the other hand, looking back on it all now, leaving not just San Francisco but the very notion of a permanent address behind seems an inevitable path. Early in 2009, I wrote about what kind of man I am. I had few answers, and many questions:

[A]gain, I ask myself, who am I? What is my sexual submissiveness without the dominant presence that revived it when I had given it up those four long years ago? What is my career when I have achieved, for me, an unprecedented level of recognition after 8 long years of being in the workforce? What is my contribution to my own future, and to people like me who are still young children today?

What kind of man am I if so much of the world I live in refuses to see manliness in what I am? Because today, having considered the possibility that I was perhaps a woman at earlier stages of my life, it turns out I am a man. And I am going to make the world know it is good to be the kind of man I am.

Then, in January of 2010, I wrote about what kind of world I wanted to live in. Again, I had few answers, and many questions:

Many of our current societal systems are unsustainable. We all know it. We’ve all felt the effects.

Global financial crisis. Depreciation of college degrees. Ecological disasters. Massive civil unrest resulting in groups of unhappy, violent people (“terrorists”). If we as the human race are going to survive the century, we simply have to change the rules of this game. And that starts with normal people like you and me committing to doing what we want to do, not what we were told we have to do. I wasn’t comfortable playing by the rules of the so-called well-schooled majority, and I’m no longer comfortable playing by the rules of this economy. I now aim to change it.

And 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.

Doing good work is priceless not because its execution is necessarily of superb quality, but because its value can only be determined by the people who find it useful to them. But I can’t magically transport us out of the economic jail of living paycheck-to-paycheck that so many of us are in. It’s going to take many intermediate steps to get us from here to a place where the value that people create by doing what they love is also what sustains us.

And I have only the vaguest of idealistic dreams for how I’m going to help get us there. But I do have those dreams, and I can’t ignore them.

And so, I began 2011 in something of a haze, “trapped in a world between worlds.”

Holidays or arbitrary markers like a “new year” are difficult times for me. Either they seem an excuse for thoughtless hedonism—parties without purpose, drinks without delight, gifts without generosity, kisses without chemistry—or they are permeated with an intolerable veneer of culturally-imposed “togetherness” that leaves too many out in the cold, often literally. And yet….

And yet, this year has been remarkable. I was angry—oh, so angry—and frustrated that I could not explain exactly why. But, slowly, that began to change. I was sad, and I felt isolated by a system that had conditioned me to feel alone. But that, too, slowly began to change.

I adopted the designation “Social Justice Technologist” without having any real idea of what that means. But in talking to others about it, I refined my own understanding. Yes, I am interested in using telecommunications technologies to improve the world, but I no longer define “technology” so narrowly.

A social justice technologist is someone who works to improve the technology—the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes—of social justice movements themselves. “The technology of social justice” is as social as it is machined; its componentry includes both carbon and silicon. How do people interface with themselves and with their cultures? With other cultures? What is the DNA, the vital code, of a human relationship? Can the conditions necessary to nurture empathic, compassionate communications between human beings and their natural environment be replicated, and if so, how? How do “edge cases,” one-offs, weirdos, become (sub)cultures?

What is the personal genesis of self-empowerment? Are there invariable, atomic elements common among these experiences? If so, what is the most effective way to infuse the largest number of people with these positive experiences in a way that successfully engenders autonomous power for each given individual? Is there a single, critical pressure point on which we as a community can converge to instigate the crumbling of sex-negativity and the rise of an authentically sex-positive worldwide social order? If so, I want to find that pressure point, that crack in the hegemony, and direct every single ounce of strength I have there until I have no life force left.

The world will follow wherever we lead it—kicking and screaming if they must. I promise you that. And that’s when the impossible magnitude of what I was thinking about hit me like a ton of bricks: I can not do this alone.

Thankfully, somewhere in the midst of all this theorizing, all this doing and failing and doing again, something magical happened: I began to understand how to connect with you. One piece, one memory, one story at a time. Bit by digital bit, I reconstituted myself in a form both evanescent yet permanent enough to squeeze sufficiently through the static walls surrounding us and feel the spark of possibility—a mental liberation more akin to psychological rebellion than physical revolution, but an imaginative seed nonetheless. I embraced the fortune of my privileges and the plight of my oppressions.

Most importantly, and most recently, I have learned to refuse the repressions of either of these things. And having that knowledge is such great power.

And that brings me to today, the start of 2012. What could a submissive man do with autonomous power? What ought anyone do with it? Here’s an idea:

[L]et's bomb the factory
that makes all the wannabes.
Let's burst all the bubbles
that brainwash the masses.

And so, while many others are out on this New Year’s Eve, I’m at home taking stock not only of the past year, but also of all the stuff I have. That coffee table I never used, those folding chairs still folded in the corner, the extra pair of linens I never needed to wash because I never used them. Those hand towels. The desk at which I’m sitting and wrote so much. My bed. That pile of electronics in the corner.

It’s all just stuff I don’t need, distractions I can’t afford, things I hardly used. The only reason I have them is because I was afraid of not having them, because I was made to believe I was supposed to have an apartment, with stuff, purchased using money from a job I don’t like to make me feel better about having that job I never really even fucking wanted. And now, I’m not so afraid of that anymore.

So I’m giving it all away. On January 6^th, 2012, I’m inviting you to show up at my door, look around my apartment, find something you like, tell me you want it, and if it’s not already been spoken for, it’s yours. Seriously. Quoting from the event I put on Facebook:

Here’s the deal: I have a lot of stuff. […] There’s no way I can carry it all while I travel. So before I sell most of it, I want to give my personal community (that’s you!) first dibs on taking it all FOR FREE.

All I ask is that if you take, say, a frying pan, next time I’m in your neck of the woods, please make me an omelette on it. :) If you take my squash racquet, treat me to a game of squash next time I’m in town. You get the drill.

After that? I’m off to the East coast again. And, if you haven’t been reading my blog in an RSS reader, you might have noticed my travel itinerary is now visible on my sidebar, along with my current whereabouts. This information, along with details regarding my basic needs like food and shelter, is also on my new “Cyberbusking” page. And if you are reading my blog in an RSS reader, you’ll see a note at the bottom of all my entries reminding you that I’m jumping off this cliff and trying to grow my wings on my way down.

I’ll need help, and I’m still learning how to ask for it; to date, your retweets, reblogs, and the other ways you have engaged with me through this telepathic non-magic of the Internet has been profound, and profoundly appreciated. Thank you. I also want to keep helping others—and I think I can. So in addition to the above, I’ve added a contact form at the bottom of my “Seminars” page where you can tell me more about you and what you’re hoping we can make happen together. Because, as the song goes:

As far as I can tell,
it doesn't matter who you are,
if you can believe there's something worth fighting for.
The colour of an eye,
the glory of a sudden view,
the baby in your arms,
the smile he always shoots at you.

Believing in nothing
makes life so boring,
so let's pray for something
to feel good in the morning.

[…]

So live for tomorrow,
and do what you have to.

My tomorrow is also a callback to my past. After the East coast, and after I complete the legal transition out of my apartment in January, I’m planning to travel to Denver, where an amazingly talented core set of unorganizers have laid the groundwork for KinkForAll Denver, and I’m going to support them however I can. After that, I’ll be presenting at Atlanta Poly Weekend 2012, and then—if I get some help traveling from Atlanta back to Washington, DC—I’ll see about participating in this year’s MOMENTUM Con.

But, really, who knows what the future holds? I don’t.

As for right now, as the revelry of New Year’s Day 2012 becomes louder with each passing tick-tock of the clock, I sit here, preparing myself to say goodbye to the stuff in the walls I once called my house. Truth is, that’s all San Francisco was; a house—never a home.

Maybe I never had a home. Or maybe I ought not have defined “home” so narrowly.

Suddenly the world seems such a perfect place.
Suddenly it moves with such a perfect grace.
Suddenly my life doesn't seem such a waste.

[…]

Come what may.

Save one thing: “the revolution” isn’t “coming.” It’s here, now. Forget New Year’s “resolutions,” reject anything and everything that doesn’t feel right to you; this is a chance of a lifetime. For our own sakes, let’s take it!

And since this is my story, if there’s one thing I hope to learn from this opportunity above all others, I want it to be how to love and be loved in return.

Sexploration’s Sex Geek Potluck

Last night, I had the privilege and the honor to be invited by Monika, host of Sexploration with Monika, to participate in a “sex geek potluck” down at the FCC Free Radio outpost. Moreover, I was even given airtime to talk about some of the events I’m participating in throughout March. I had a great time, and I can’t thank Monika and her party co-organizer cohort, Reid Mihalko, enough for the opportunity. :)

I’ve excerpted the segment of my time on the radio below, but you can listen to the whole show for free all this week.

• Audio clip and text transcript (15:39) of Maymay and Monika talking about “Remaking Male Submission,” masculinity, and “femdom” porn. Later in the audio, Maggie joins in and the two of us discuss censorship of sexuality on the Internet.

March Events

In March alone, I’ll be making an appearance at the following events.

March 5^th — BDSM: Kink Isn’t So Scary

The Western Regionals LGBTQIA Conference this year is being hosted by UC Berkeley, and I’m going to be a panelist on the only one of only 2 BDSM-themed sessions at the conference.¹ The panel is called “BDSM: Kink Isn’t So Scary.” (A full conference schedule and workshop listing is also available.) One reason I’m particularly excited is because one of my fellow panelists will be none other than Miss Maggie Mayhem, whom I’ve developed an incredible admiration for over the past few months.

After speaking to the panel facilitators, a UC Berkeley student and an alumn, I’m hopeful that this will be a great chance to humanize BDSM’ers and counter folks who would demonize us. Aside from my niggling objection at the synonymous use of “BDSM” and “Kink” (an objection I’ll surely raise at some point in the panel itself), our panel has been given center-stage in a room with a several-hundred person capacity, stadium seating, and a gigantic projector.

March 6^th — Kink On Tap special with Dr. Staci Newmahr

That weekend, I’ll be interviewing the author of the pathbreaking new book, Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy. Dr. Staci Newmahr is a sexuality researcher who holds a Ph.D. in sociology. The book chronicles her experiences in a public BDSM community and is literally the single best exposition on the topic of SM and its relationship to gender, violence, and interpersonal relationships I have ever read. Like all Kink On Tap shows, we’ll broadcast live at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific on Sunday evening, and you can tune in live to be given a chance to ask Dr. Newmahr questions.

There’s also a FetLife and Facebook event listing for this show because it’s a “special,” and we’ll be putting the news stories aside for now and engaging entirely with Dr. Newmahr’s amazing work. If you’ve ever wanted a chance to ask a BDSM researcher a question about the community, this is your chance. Don’t miss it!

March 19^th — KinkForAll Providence 2

As a fitting climax for Brown University’s Sex Week 2011, the hardworking student organizers at the Brown University Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council (SHEEC) have once again sponsored a KinkForAll event: KinkForAll Providence 2. Like last year’s KinkForAll Providence, this one promises to be spectacular, only even bigger.

SHEEC has reserved two whole floors of Smith-Buonanno Hall at 95 Cushing Street. Yours truly will be bringing in equipment for a live stream, so even if you can’t make it to Providence in March, you’ll be able to watch KFAPVD2 live online, or follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #KFAPVD2. There are FetLife and Facebook KFAPVD2 event listings and you’re encouraged to RSVP there, but please, please, please also remember to sign up on the KFAPVD2 wiki registration table to help out the organizers in a coordinated fashion. (Furthermore, free Wi-Fi at KFAPVD2 is guaranteed only to those who register on the wiki and email the SHEEC folks ahead of time.)

Also, did you notice our nifty KFAPVD2 graphic icons? I love ‘em. ;)

March 21^st — On Dichotomies: Breaking Binaries and Why That’s Empowering

After KFAPVD2 on Saturday at Brown University, I was honored to be invited to lead a seminar called “On Dichotomies: Breaking Binaries and Why That’s Empowering” at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Queer Student Association. Readers following KinkForAll closely will recognize the kernel of the seminar from last year’s event in Providence. The RISD seminar will be a long-form discussion of the same material, featuring a facilitated Q&A after the slideshow.

The QSA set up a Facebook event page for the seminar (and I made a FetLife event listing, too). I’d be thrilled to see some familiar faces from KinkForAll Providence 1 in the audience, but I’m equally excited for the opportunity to hear from people I’ve never spoken with before. Even if you can’t make it to the RISD campus for this event, please share it amongst your friends. :)

March 22^nd — Remaking Male Submission: Confronting Sexism in BDSM

While I’m in Providence, I’ve also been invited by Megan Andelloux to lead a workshop at The Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health. I proposed a workshop called “Remaking Male Submission: Confronting Sexism in BDSM,” which is both personally and professionally challenging for me but which I’m very passionate about. Here’s the description as cross-posted on Male Submission Art:

Oscar Wilde once said, “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” In this interactive seminar and slideshow, we’ll examine the nature of sex and power by exploring common cultural depictions of sexually dominant women, and especially submissive men. Join maymay, a sexually submissive man himself and curator of the crowd-sourced erotic photography blog MaleSubmissionArt.com, to tackle deeply-held beliefs about gender and challenge assumptions about “kinky” sex. Just how prevalent, or lacking, is imagery of submissive men? Further, does the existing imagery really offer an alternative to mainstream sexual stereotyping, or does it actually serve to reify the—pun intended—dominant paradigm of male power? Is the public BDSM subculture a haven of free expression, or simply another cage of rigid gender roles dressed up (often literally) in different clothes?

Naturally, I’ve made Facebook and FetLife event listings for this event, too, and would appreciate your help in spreading the word about this workshop in particular. Since the topic matter here is so close to my heart, I’ve found myself hitting wall after wall of self-doubt, questioning and second-guessing myself time and again. I’m exceptionally nervous about this workshop because I believe that if I get it wrong, I’ll be excommunicated from the BDSM community and no one will care. If I get it right, I may still be excommunicated, but at least I’ll get people thinking. And, surprisingly, I still care about the community, despite my anger at it—a fine line to walk.

March 26^th — Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher

I’ll be leaving Providence the same week I arrive in order to fly to Atlanta, Georgia for the inaugural Atlanta Poly Weekend conference. There, I’ll be leading another all-new workshop called “Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher,” which will focus on practical things laymen (not technical specialists like me) can do to protect their online presence against incidental as well as intentional censorship. The workshop will offer minimal foundational theory using real-life examples to help sex-positive publishers connect the dots between technical issues and their own work. In other words, this is the counterpoint to my warnings to technologists that sexually vocal Internet users are the first—but never the last—casualty of Internet censorship.

(As an aside, I am still looking to share my hotel room with someone the night of Sunday, March 27^th. If you’re going to be participating in the Atlanta Poly Weekend conference, or know someone who is, and you’re in need of a hotel room for the evening, please email me or cross-post my request for a roommate to your favorite Atlanta-area local polyamory mailing list on my behalf. I can hardly afford this travel right now so splitting the costs of a hotel stay is welcome. I don’t snore or anything. Promise.)

Future public speaking and activism opportunities

One of the reasons this is possible is because I’ve started to get approached by university professors, campus student groups, community organization programming committees, and others who are seeking public speakers, guest lecturers, or workshop facilitators to fill their calendar. I’m immensely flattered by all the recent offers and I regret that I haven’t the funds to fly everywhere I’ve been invited. However, the invitations are encouraging and given the opportunity to continue jet-setting around the country to nurture sex-positivity and sexual freedom, I’m going to do it.

On that note, if you or your organization has an interest in booking me for an engagement, please get in touch! If you think someone you know might be interested, please send them to my “Things I’ve done” page so they can become familiar with me and my work quickly and easily.

My life is only as good as my connections to the good people in it. Please help me fill my life with goodness, and help me help fill others’ lives with the same. :)

1. Thanks for pointing out the other, Nikola.

While I believe that transparency is necessary…is it hypocritical to use the mask of a pseudonym and alternate persona to share sexually-explicit thoughts of a challenging nature? Should people who stand by transparency eschew the masks that have protected writers to some extent? Obviously different people will have different opinions on this, but I’m asking for yours, maymay, because both transparency and removing censorship have been part of the convictions within your own writing.

This got me thinking so I drafted a response and, despite mulling it over for a while, I’ve reached the limit of my thoughts on the matter. Therefore, since this blog is rightfully more read than my scratchpad, I’m sharing it here:

I see nothing hypocritical in being pseudonymous while espousing transparency. Moreover, your question seems to come from a profoundly ethical place, for which you should be very proud. Here’s why I say that.

Many people think of transparency as the endpoint on a line. At the other far end of this line is privacy. This defines transparency as privacy’s antonym. That theory is flawed; it incorrectly couples transparency with disclosure and incorrectly couples privacy with anonymity. But none of these things are synonymous.

In reality, transparency and privacy are two different lines. Neither concept violates the principles of the other. Your own question highlights precisely why this is so: speech is never more free than when it is anonymous. That’s why defending freedom of speech is inextricably linked with defending the use of anonymity. Note that many people who defend anonymity do so non-anonymously (like me).

This is important: anonymity has benefits, such as freedom from responsibility, but it also has costs, such as a loss of credibility. Defining transparency as privacy’s opposite is as nonsensical as defining credibility and responsibility as mutually exclusive. Advocating transparency, while part of the same war, is another battlefield entirely.

So rather than treating transparency as a counterweight to privacy, consider treating it as a model to ensure accountability, a conceptual framework for why it’s important to keep records about who did what and when, but not about who can access those records.

Yet another way to think about transparency is in terms of audiences. Good public speakers, writers, and academics know that different people will understand their work differently, and thus they tend to tweak their presentations depending on who they’re presenting their material to. Similarly, representing “the public” as a monolith is dangerously flawed: there are many publics, many audiences. Where background (heritage) factors into determinations for an “audience,” context (related circumstances) factors into determinations for a “public.”

The lynchpin here is a multi-faceted notion of identity. You have a legal identity, a personal identity, a physical identity, a gender identity, a sexual identity, a political identity, an erotic author identity, and so on. Ideally, these identities don’t need to be coupled unless you want one of them to gain the reputation—the credibility—accrued from another. Historically, it’s been difficult to decouple some identities from one another (physical and gendered, for instance), but technology is changing that.

When the various identities you have are all harmoniously working towards the same ends, you as a single consciousness can be said to “have integrity.” When the actions of your identities do not align, you can be correctly said to be behaving “hypocritically.” Such dissonance tends to make ethical people sad. Sadly, it seems to have little emotional effect on evildoers.

Ultimately, transparency, like privacy, is just a tool. Integrity is what really matters.

I hope this helps.

Whoever you are, Anonymous, thanks for asking me your question.

A synopsis, followed by the video and its transcript, is below:

Recent Internet censorship stories such as the WikiLeaks saga have surprised some people, but not sexually vocal Internet users, who have been the unsung vanguard of anti-censorship efforts for many years. And this is true even if their content contains less skin than the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, as in the case of the NYC Sex Blogger Calendar. Nevertheless, straw-man arguments are routinely used to marginalize people who publish controversial material. Thankfully, since copying is a creative act, it can be used to directly combat the destructive act of Internet censorship.

Hi, my name’s maymay. I’m a sex blogger, and a sexual freedom activist, and as such I get censored online more than I think is fair. So I had some ideas about that and I wanted to share them with you.

So, here’s the premise. Let’s imagine you have something to say and you want to say it. No problem: you get a blog and you publish it. But this simple activity presumes that on the Internet, all content is created equal. Or, as ever so famously phrased, “In our world, al the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits.” Beautiful.

But is it really the case? If it were, non-controversial content like this would be pretty much the same as controversial content, perhaps of a political nature. Of course, we know that content is not all treated equally. And last week we saw a dramatic re-enactment of what that looks like.

Wikileaks faced all kinds of attacks. A lot of people were surprised that this kind of arbitrary censorship happened but to sex bloggers like me it was no surprise at all. In fact, the more sexually vocal you’ve been online, the more likely you are to have seen this coming. Here’s a few examples.

PayPal freezing WikiLeaks’ account came as no surprise to the folks who published the NYC Sex Blogger Calendar, who have had their PayPal account frozen and their funds seized not once, but twice, before they decided to ditch the service way back in 2008! And just last month, there was a big hoopla over Amazon’s initial defense of, then banning of a “Pedophile book” from their virtual shelves. Interestingly enough, Amazon initially said it wouldn’t pull the book because that would amount to censorship. Eventually, Amazon capitulated to public pressure and, of course, now the book is gone.

Amazon’s conflicting actions with regards to the pedophile book and Wikileaks should teach us 2 very important lessons. First, that censorship can be social just as much as as it can be technical. And secondly, that sexual speech will always be in the vanguard of anti-censorship efforts, and thus sexual speech will always be censorship’s initial–but never its last–casualty.

So here’s how we can frame the censorship versus free speech problem: On the Internet, even if your content may not be illegal, if you can’t find anyone to host it, link to it, or bill for it, it may as well be. To bring this back down to an Earthly example again, if Assange is a “terrorist,” not a journalist, then Galileo was a heretic, not a scientist, and that, since I’m a “sex” blogger discussing sexuality a lot online would make me a “pedophile.” Of course, we’re none of these things.

Nevertheless, we’ll all get called these things because, in the words of national security blogger Maximilian Forte, “The real ‘insurgency’ is the one being fought at home. To the state, every defiant citizen is a terrorist, in mind if not in practice.” So let’s look at how this is playing out in the Wikileaks case, just very briefly.

When governments started censoring Wikileaks, copies of the cables started popping up on mirror sites. At first, only a hundred or so. But within a week thousands. This happened for one very simple reason: the Internet is a copy machine. Since digital copying is so inexpensive, combating Internet censorship is as simple as copying and distributing the censored thing so censorship itself becomes increasingly expensive. But to do that, even today, you need supporters–you need humans.

As Dan Gillmor explains it, “WikiLeaks is the beneficiary, in this respect, of a wide swath of support from people who will make it part of their life’s mission to help prevent this particular instance of censorship from succeeding. How ready or able will they be to defend free speech every time it’s threatened in the future?” Okay, that’s great for Wikileaks, right? But what about me? What about you?

Right now, if I wanted to go publish something I had to say, I’d go to my own website, publish there, and then whatever I published would get pushed out to any number of other sites. Note that pushing the content to the other sites creates a copy.

But what if I first went to a remote site, published there, then had my own site pull that content back? There are already some ways to do this, so at first it didn’t seem like a big deal, but I wanted to see how far I could stretch this idea.

So I started experimenting at one of my own sites, KinkOnTap.com in this case. Here you see that a blog post I wrote actually came from Delicious.com, originally. I never had to go to my site to publish the post; I wrote it in Delicious and my site copied or “pulled” what I wrote from there.

Then I started experimenting with other tools all over the place. I wrote in Google Reader, copied over to Facebook, other feeds, and so on. I even enrolled other people to write so that no single user account was adding content into the copying machine.

The basic idea turned out pretty powerful: publishing first-class content elsewhere meant that my own website wasn’t the only place where my content was, which meant censoring my site itself wouldn’t do much good in terms of stopping my content from reaching others’ eyes. Moreover, censors would have to block a service provider, which means they’ll upset a whole lot of “legitimate” users who’ll want the block removed, too, regardless of their feelings about my content since they just want to use the service, for instance Delicious.

So that’s where I’m currently at with all of this. But if you’ll indulge my idealism for a moment, maybe the ideas herein can be amplified in the realm of the currently-theoretical.

Recall that being able to copy cheaply is what makes censorship expensive. Copying, in this model, is essentially an embodiment of the expression of free speech. Moreover copying is nonviolent, that is, it’s a creative, not a destructive, act. I think this is an important nuance because, as John F. Kennedy says: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

In other words, the cheaper you make it to create rather than destroy, and perhaps the more copying is inextricably tied to publishing, the more nonviolent social change will be. So, with that in mind, what if…?

What if in order to download a web page, you had to serve one? What if in order to have someone host your blog, you had to host someone else’s? See, the thing is, everyone cares devoutly about their own freedom of speech, but it’s the other guy’s that’s important. What if something like BitTorrent wasn’t for file swapping? What if it was a web server? To “say” (or publish) something, you’d have to let someone else “say” something, too. And would you gag your enemies if it meant gagging yourself?

So, these are just some ideas I’ve been playing around with. I made a space some months ago to brainstorm ideas like this, mostly myself right now. It’s at InternetNonviolence.org. I’d love it if you joined me there to talk about all this stuff. :)

Thanks very much.

[T]hey were coming from an unashamed left perspective on [Kink On Tap….]

I got sooo much information that I’m already applying to my perception of gender in the real world. And just a lot more understanding of how people who incorporate BDSM into their lives arent’ mentally ill, which is often the only way that they are identified in certain parts of the world. And there was some great stuff on sex work and ethical pornography…

[…I]f you think Kink On Tap is a minefield with one-sided opinions then think of the good stuff in the rest of the stuff out there as finding needles in haystacks. (The good stuff and/or the stuff that’s relevant to your interests.) The problem with the world of all this ‘kink’ and sexuality stuff is that there is absolutely nowhere else where things get spoken about on such a level playing field…so many disparate topics with no one afraid to just ask ‘I don’t understand, can you please explain?’ The BDSM community can be just as judgmental and exclusive as any other, and Kink On Tap often had people with very disparate opinions asking each other why they thought that way…

It isn’t a podcast that fits an agenda, as all the other podcasts and blogs out there pretty much do. They’re set to a very small audience and often are full of advertising for products I really don’t want to endorse in any way (pornography I object to, sex toy manufacturers with debatable ethics). When I found Kink On Tap I was elated to find people talking about things that interested me without making me feel like I had to already know everything, or made it a fetishised space, incompatible with ‘normal’ ways of thinking.

Which is why I’m so sad to hear it’s ending. :( Number 67 will be the last cast, or at least the last for a long time. May is suffering a lot from mental health and personal issues and no one around him has been able to help with the technical aspects of the show, and he’s become really bitter about this. So he’s stopping, because it’s not fun anymore. This is where he talks about some of the impact the cast has had on him and others, and his view of the world (which is unapologetically opinionated).

So I’m going to have to keep trawling through (literally) a hundred blogs and feeds, and a dozen sexuality related podcasts, to find the nuggets of humanity that I can relate to or find useful in interactions in the world…it takes so much energy to find what was so effortlessly in Kink on Tap (for me).

Wow. (Here’s some background.)

Thanks. This made my night.

Congratulations to the author (who used the photo with permission) on the publication of her ethnographic research. I’m looking forward to reading a copy myself.

The blogger cited Clarisse Thorn’s post about outness, a topic inspired by the uncompromising and principled transparency offered at KinkForAll. In the comment thread, Clarisse cited me as the only blogger she knew who ever writes about BDSM without fear of linking my legal name to my nickname or pseudonym:

Yeah … it’s a sad conundrum. I only know one kink blogger who doesn’t write under a pseudonym—[…] maymay, who blogs at maybemaimed.com—and he’s been personally attacked for it. He’s lucky because he has an easily freelanceable job in a highly kink-tolerant field (programming). I’d like to collapse my pseudonym someday, but I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe enough.

It’s an interesting post. It also inspired me to write this comment, which I think is valuable enough to share here, too:

For what it’s worth, I’m not out just for me, I’m also out for you. That is, choosing to desegregate my legal name from my nickname/pseudonym with regards to my BDSM and other sexuality writings is a political act. Only when enough of us come out of the closet will we gain the political power necessary to effect the social change that brings acceptance from the hegemony to the undercultures we thrive in.

Until then, you will never be safe, not out of the closet, and certainly not in the closet, despite how much more comfortable it may feel to you to be pseudonymous for now. Being out of the closet makes me safer.

Also, it should perhaps be noted that I’m not simply “lucky,” although I certainly am fortunate. I worked damn hard to create a situation for myself that allowed me to be out about who I am authentically, to live the way I want to live (economically, socially, and otherwise), and that this was not an easy or an uncomplicated path, nor a task that can genuinely be called “done” at any given moment. My goal in doing this is singularly directed: to make it easier for the next person who wants to live an authentic life out of the closet to do so.

Anyway, in the mean time, you may find my blog post about online reputation management for sex bloggers worthwhile reading.

It’s vital that you understand this, not for my sake, but for your own. Living as though you already have the freedom you want to create is the single most powerful way to bring that freedom to fruition for yourself, for your friends, and for our collective future. Postpone this reality at your own peril.

About an hour ago, while walking home from Noisebridge, I was mugged. Two men who seemed to be in their mid-twenties, one dark-skinned gentleman and one lighter-skinned, wearing black hoodies and jeans attacked me at the corner of Fillmore and Waller streets. The dark-skinned man looped his arm around my throat roughly and yanked me to the floor, catching my bag as I fell and pulling it above me.

“Give me everything you’ve got!” he yelled at me.

“Hold on! Hold on!” I said.

I was on the floor in an instant and trying to find the strap of my bag. I couldn’t, he pulled it above my head, and the two men bolted as fast as they could.

As I got up, I pulled out my phone from my pocket and dialed 9-1-1. A few minutes later a police car sped up to me, I waved at it, and the officer inside rolled down his window as he slowed. He asked me a few questions, including asking for a brief description and the direction the perps ran. I told him, he said he’d be right back, and he sped off.

A few minutes later he returned empty handed. I tweeted. I filed a police report.

Inside my beige one-strap bag was a 15” MacBook Pro laptop, (serial number W89410HRB22) one with a specially-ordered matte display. (I hate the glossy ones.) There was also the laptop charger, my Samsung mobile phone charger, and a bunch of other odds-and-ends, including two Rubik’s cubes. All told, it was pretty expensive: upwards of about $2,500. While I’m pretty sure the data on my laptop is (mostly) backed up safely, my pen-and-paper notebook, which I’ve carried with me for more than two years and is full of irreplaceable notes and memories, was also stolen. That’s hard copy, and can’t be backed up digitally. Damn.

I don’t have a budget for replacing this stuff. Some of it can’t be replaced. I’m taking the somewhat uncharacteristic step of asking you to donate whatever amount that you can to me through the donation button below to help me weather the budget crunch I’m going to have to deal with in the next couple of months as I replace my equipment. It’s particularly bad timing; I just bought airfare for the upcoming CSPH conference as well as a conference ticket for the Poly Leadership Summit in Seattle, which I have yet to purchase travel for.

HELP MAYMAY REPLACE STOLEN EQUIPMENT AFTER STREET MUGGING:

If you can’t offer me financial support, then please, please, please simply take the time to tweet about this blog post. Muggings rarely end with stolen goods returned to their owners, but the ones that do all have one thing in common: people are able to identify the goods quickly because word gets around. Here are some 140-character postings you can use to help me out. (Consider it a karmic investment.)

• Help @maymaym recover from getting mugged on the street in #SF. His laptop and bag was stolen. Help him out: http://ur1.ca/1mqz0 Pls RT—thx!
• Activist @maymaym’s laptop stolen in SF street mugging. Chip in to help replace it http://ur1.ca/1mqz0 and/or RT to get item description out
• See 15″ MacBook Pro laptop w/matte screen selling in Bay Area in odd circumstances? Contact @maymaym. Was stolen: http://ur1.ca/1mqz0 Pls RT

Alternatively, of course, write your own tweet or cross-post this entry and include a link back to this blog post.

So, yeah, it’s kind of been a shitty month. Thanks for your help, in whatever form it may take.

Those who oppose our most basic rights are not, as many would have the public believe, just well-meaning, ordinary citizens. They are calculating opportunists who operate at the highest levels of academia and government, influencing policy and opinion to the advancement of their personal and political agendas—at our expense.

The cost of inaction is your sexual freedom, the ability to exercise your rights to love whom and how you choose, to control not only your own life but how you make life. That freedom is stolen by a threat used against anyone who dares say something that opposes or exposes sex-negative interests for the shame they are, as former US Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders and countless others can testify. That threat, in the hands of the sex-negative and the hateful, goes something like this: “If you question us, then you’re a child molester, a sexual predator, a rapist, and/or an enabler of those horrors.”

These people have two primary weapons, fear and obfuscation, which they use to pass unjust laws and attack political opponents. And they wield these weapons masterfully. As Melissa Ditmore, Ph.D., wrote (in 2008!) of the worrisome increase in panic-driven legislation, in this case legislation addressing sex work:

Sex law is often a front for ideology that constrains rather than liberates women. What most appalls me about the recent conflation of trafficking and sex work in law and policy is that some feminists support the confusion. These women would normally never dream of telling other women how to behave, because they have fought against imposed constraints in their own lives. Yet they seem to think it is acceptable to tell sex workers what is best for them, and they are prepared to use dubious political alliances to advance their moral agenda.

Only when the whole truth and nothing but the truth is laid bare, evidence reveals these “concerned citizens” as the hypocritical ideologues they are. Even the recent ruling overturning “Proposition Hate” explicitly recognizes this: The Protect Marriage campaign advertisements ensured California voters had these previous fear-inducing messages in mind. The evidence at trial shows those fears to be completely unfounded. (Emphasis mine.)

So watch the media closely, and critically. Your freedoms and your future need you now. As Driftglass said on Kink On Tap 52, First of all, a robust and powerful investigative media is necessary to a democracy. And secondly, citizens have to take responsibility for knowing shit and getting angry about shit and then taking action about it.

That’s why I’ve been reading FBI complaints, government press releases, news archives, and a host of other documents in order to learn all I can about how hateful people with political influence operate. And if I don’t share what I know, fewer people will be equipped to take action. So, very soon, I will share, because as Jacob Applebaum said, People in the United States of America have the ability to democratically change this situation if they are unhappy with the truth; they now have information that will assist them in having a clearer picture. Perhaps they will demand more transparency and more accountability.

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

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

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

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

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

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