Thursday, June 24, 2010

KinkForAll versus Stop Porn Culture: guess who’s filthier!

Category labels: BDSM in the media, Kink events, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Vanilla life, Writing and blogging

Over at the Washington City Paper, Amanda Hess wrote about her experiences at KinkForAll Washington DC 2 and Dr. Gail Dines’ Stop Porn Culture anti-porn activist briefing on The Hill last Tuesday. Her column is well worth a read, and exposes the should-be-obvious blatant hypocrisy with which fear-mongering anti-porn crusaders conduct themselves on a regular basis:

When it comes to anti-porn activism, sex sells. At the briefing, Wheelock College professor Gail Dines becomes perhaps the first person to utter the words “cum dumpster” at a Capitol Hill press event. Over the past 20 years, Dines has made a living observing such degradations. As the crowd picks at fruit plates, she rattles off a selection of titles she’s researched, such as Anally Ripped Whores and Gag on My Cock.

Where Maymay displays spreadsheets, the porn critics on Capitol Hill show pictures.

I encourage you to read the whole thing. It’s very succinct, and all told I think quite fair.

Last week, Amanda contacted me and asked me some questions for her story in an email. I want to share that email here because I think comparing and contrasting the published article with the email interview is illustrative for anyone who finds themselves in a spotlight.

OK, here are my questions for you:

1. First off, are you comfortable with me printing your full name?

Yes, but I’d strongly prefer you to use my more well-known pseudonym, ‘maymay.’ I’m not asking this because my real name is hidden or because I’m not “out” in any way, but you and I both know how much work online reputation management is, and I’d appreciate your assistance in helping me keep the quality of life online I currently have.

2. How about your age?

Go for it. I’m 25.

3. Donna M. Hughes’ and Margaret Brooks’ bulletin suggested that some people had warned you that your ideas on Kink-for-All being open to the public could get you labeled as a “pedophile.” Had you ever been labeled a “pedophile” before that bulletin was sent out?

No. The first instance of those accusations was a direct result of Donna M. Hughes’ and Margaret Brooks’ bulletin.

4. Some background on the first KFADC: What inspired the relocation from Bethesda Chevy-Chase high school to the Montgomery County Executive Office Building?

First off, let me say I’m no more privy to those conversations than anyone else is. The relocation is well-documented in the KinkForAll mailing list archives, where it was announced—that’s how I learned about the relocation. The KinkForAll mailing list and its archives are intentionally public in an effort to keep KinkForAll as a community as transparent, accessible, and accountable as possible.

Anyway, for the nitty-gritty about the relocation, see this thread: http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall/browse_thread/thread/22853a9dc1f73131/d4ba9972d600038e

Quoting from Nikolas, Basically, the school board is prepared to make a big deal [legally and politically] about KinkForAll being at the school. […] One part of their argument is that there’s an increased chance of sex offenders being present on school grounds […] They are also invoking the school’s responsibility to shield children from material they deem inappropriate.

Obviously, I feel that the school board’s concerns are misguided, and I find it interesting that the concerns they cited are exactly the same concerns Donna M. Hughes, Margaret Brooks and other critics of KinkForAll cite in an unsuccessful attempt to paint the event as “obscene” and “a danger to the community” in which it is held. The similarity of the concerns showcase the necessity for a more judicious attitude not merely about KinkForAll, but sexuality as a whole. I spoke about the first KinkForAll Washington DC’s relocation and its wider implications on the perception of youth sexuality at that event. The video of my presentation is available online, and has received more than 3,000 views in a matter of months:

http://vimeo.com/7783159

I think it’s unfortunate that some people jump to horrific conclusions about our community-based sexuality education initiative without doing basic research such as attending one of the events themselves. I mean, the unconferences are designed to be very accessible; they’re totally free.

5. In Boston, what inspired the move from the University of Massachusetts-Boston to Boston University?

Once again, I don’t have any special knowledge here. All of the information I have is publicly available on the mailing list. In this case, the thread you should read is here: http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall/browse_thread/thread/d90859b29f491e1d/0409ff624bc21cca

I asked for this information in the thread: It would also be beneficial if Trish or whoever else has details about what *exactly* happened and also *why* UMass Boston is pulling out could share that information in writing[…].

The person who secured the original venue in the first place, Trish, said this in another email in the same thread: “There was a regime change in administration/coordination over the summer, and the commitments to give space to the old regime were not honored by the new regime.”

That’s all the information I have because that’s all the information on the mailing list. I again stress that I rely on the same sources that the public does for information about KinkForAll because those sources are one and the same. This is why KinkForAll is so transparent and so honest—the processes we use for producing unconferences are the exact same ones we use to document our activities and share them with the world. For more details on this venue change, you’ll have to ask UMass directly, or at least ask Trish.

Despite the fact that KinkForAll Boston lost its confirmed venue 8 days before the unconference was to be held, the unconference received no less than 3 alternative offers within a matter of days. Boston University was the venue ultimately chosen and the event was a wonderful success.

I think that this instance was a remarkable example of how KinkForAll really shines: the agility of the unconference model coupled with the passion of the unorganizers empowered the community to handle this major unforeseen hurdle with grace and speed. The host of KinkForAll Boston was the Women’s Resource Center at Boston University, the leader of which personally commented to me about how inspired she was and asked if future KinkForAll unconferences would be held at Boston University. I told her what I tell everyone who asks me that: KinkForAll happens whenever you want it to happen. If you want to have one, join the KinkForAll mailing list and ask for help unorganizing one yourself. :)

6. You’ve blogged about attempting to contact Hughes and Brooks about the bulletin. Did they ever respond to your requests?

A few days after Donna M. Hughes’ and Margaret Brooks’ bulletin was distributed by the Salvation Army’s Initiative Against Sexual Trafficking listserve, I wrote a blog post directly addressing their concerns about KinkForAll unconferences, but I have yet to hear any response from them despite numerous personal invitations to dialogue. Go figure. That blog post is here:

http://maybemaimed.com/2010/03/27/addressing-donna-m-hughes-and-margaret-brooks-concerns-over-kinkforall-unconferences/

I even personally invited both Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks to join the KinkForAll mailing list so that they could air their concerns to the community directly. I promised to help them liaise with the KinkForAll community at large and also reminded them that approaching our community as though it and I were one and the same devalued the contributions of the many committed unorganizers who actually produced most of the events. To date, I never saw a response either to my inbox or to the KinkForAll mailing list.

My correspondence to (and frustratingly not with) them are public, on my blog and on the KinkForAll mailing list, linked above and here: http://groups.google.com/group/kinkforall/browse_thread/thread/4020d397e88241ed/d129d5809c3a34d5#msg_0a2e3a25e924124a

Moreover, I think it’s worth pointing out that several other KinkForAll participants, notably KinkForAll Providence unorganizer Aida Manduley, also emailed Margaret Brooks, Donna M. Hughes, and their collaborator Melanie Shapiro personally. In addition to KinkForAll Providence, Aida organized a panel discussion at Brown University and invited all three academics to attend, but none of them did. Aida gave me permission to reprint her email to them, which I blogged about (along with information about the panel event, at which I spoke), here:

http://maybemaimed.com/2010/04/23/panel-at-brown-university-when-educators-are-censors/

Naturally, I recorded the panel session in case Donna M. Hughes, Margaret Brooks, or Melanie Shapiro might want to refer to the event after-the-fact, as they’d done to other events I’ve participated in previously. You can watch that video here:

http://maybemaimed.com/2010/05/08/certain-unalienable-rights/

As far as I’m aware, not one KinkForAll participant who has attempted to engage with these academics has received so much as an email reply. However, Donna M. Hughes and her colleagues have continued to publish misleading information about me, personally and by name, in more of their bulletins.

7. How do you feel about the anti-porn conferences recently held in Boston and D.C.? Can KFA attendees and anti-porn attendees find common ground somewhere?

If what anti-porn activists say can be believed, then I think KinkForAll participants and anti-porn conference attendees have the same goals. Dr. Gail Dines, who addressed Congress this past Tuesday, plainly said that porn has become the main source of sex education for boys and girls (and, presumably, differently-gendered young people who, y’know, also need sex education). This is one of the many problems that KinkForAll was carefully designed to address. Both KinkForAll participants and anti-porn activists want to see a world in which erotica intended to titillate rather than educate is NOT the primary source of sex education for anyone, young or old, because both groups fiercely believe that such material is not well-suited for the task of education.

Interestingly, KinkForAll Washington DC 2 was held the same day as Gail Dines’ Stop Porn Culture (SPC) conference, on June 12th, 2010. Several KinkForAll participants, including KinkForAll Providence unorganizer Aida Manduley and presenter Megan Andelloux, attended the SPC event where Donna M. Hughes was a prominent speaker. This resulted in some remarkable conversation on Twitter as the events’ hashtags intermingled, and I was heartened by Megan’s and Aida’s outreach. Their relentlessly respectful behavior in the face of what I can only describe as sheer contempt for their beliefs (Aida tweeted that Donna M. Hughes refused even to shake her hand) served to highlight the differences in KinkForAll participants’ mindsets versus those of anti-porn activists, and I hope I’ll continue to see positive change come from Aida and Megan’s efforts on that day.

8. Why do you think KFA scares some people?

KinkForAll acknowledges personal agency and engenders personal empowerment, two things that frighten every group that forces victimhood onto people, as anti-trafficking activists (such as Donna M. Hughes) often do to sex workers, and that anti-porn activists (such as Gail Dines) often do to men and women at large.

Moreover, KinkForAll’s principles, which presume everyone who participates regardless of race, creed, religion, age, (dis)ability, economic standing, sexual orientation, or gender has something of value to contribute, and its prioritizing of accessibility and serendipity by doing away with things like registration tickets and scheduling approval is a radical departure from more traditional conference and learning styles that many people, especially academics, are comfortable with. And we’ve all seen people fear what they find uncomfortable. So, I think KinkForAll scares the people mired in their fears rather than reaching for their dreams, and I think it appeals to optimistic people more likely to see possibility and diversity in uncertainty, rather than seeing persecution and disempowerment wherever they look.

I hope that one day, the people scared of KinkForAll—and possibly even me by association—will feel intrigued and safe enough to attend one of the unconferences, where they’ll be greeted with a smile and a handshake.

9. Why is it important to broadcast as much info about the KFA proceedings online as possible?

First and foremost, KinkForAll offers an unprecedented opportunity to improve sexuality resources of all kinds, especially educational ones. Recording media such as videos and audio and publishing them online free for the world creates a distributed yet well-organized library of discussions, presentations, lectures, online workshops, and more about all kinds of sexuality-related issues ranging from technology to health and beyond.

When people like Wisconsin DA Scott Southworth can threaten schoolteachers with imprisonment merely for following laws about sex education, I think broadcasting the crowd-sourced and novel discussions that happen at KinkForAll unconferences is more important than ever! Self-righteous morality crusaders actively undermine the efforts of accredited sex educators like Megan Andelloux (similarly targeted by Donna M. Hughes as I was) who are trying to help people overcome horrific social stigmas and devastating legal, medical, or other battles just to live free of oppression. I think supporting a grass-roots, public-domain infrastructure for inspiring conversations about the intersection of sexuality and the rest of life, as KinkForAll does, is vital to keep fear and intolerance about our sexual selves at bay.

Also, quite plainly, recording and broadcasting or documenting not just the unconference proceedings but everything else involved with it is useful when someone like you asks me about what happened, when, and why. This transparency has been an incredibly powerful shield of protection because being able to call up relevant information from a publicly archived space, and knowing that it’s accurate as it can be corroborated by anyone at any time, makes it ridiculously easy to fight claims of wrongdoing. Such accusations simply can not stand up to the facts, which everyone has equal and easy insight into. :)

Of course, not everyone feels safe being video recorded because, in society’s fevered fear of sexuality, they might lose a job or custody of their children just for being seen at a KinkForAll unconference. That’s why KinkForAll participants pay careful attention to issues of personal privacy and, among other things, supply a simple red (or sometimes bright orange) sticker that can be worn to signal one’s preference not to be photographed or video recorded. I’m saddened that the cultural fear of sex that activists and academics like Donna M. Hughes, Margaret Brooks, Gail Dines and numerous others closely associated with the anti-porn movement perpetuate still causes so much suffering. Many people worry about their safety and wellbeing, just because they’re kinky, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or intersex, or because they have any fetish at all, or because they sometimes watch porn, or because someone thinks they’re “addicted” to sex or masturbation, or, in the case of young people especially, because they’re merely trying to learn about their body.

Nevertheless, I’m hopeful that once enough media is out there, its ripple effect will make being and celebrating who we are safer than hiding who we are. Because in reality, as I learned first hand, the closet is not a safe place to be, no matter how much more uncomfortable coming out might feel at first.

And anything else you’d like to say about either KFA or the anti-porn initiatives: I’m all ears.

Amanda

I think anti-porn initiatives are a smoke-screen for real issues that affect society, real issues such as the stigmas of STIs like herpes, paranoia over youth sexuality, and legal, personal and political implications of sex blogging—real issues that KinkForAll participants are addressing in increasingly creative and empowering ways both at the unconferences themselves and in their daily lives. None of these problems will disappear with the disappearance of pornography, even if pornography were their root cause, an anti-porn activists’ claim for which there is absolutely no evidence despite decades upon decades of religiously-backed drum-banging.

I think we all need to be careful not to get distracted from the important work of making the world a more sexually healthy place by red-herring rhetoric and faulty research such as that of Stop Porn Culture. Gail Dines, her organization, and her colleagues blatantly misdirect conversation and use language and visuals calculated to trigger an emotional response of fear and anger in her audience, just as Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks did in their bulletins about me. These people consistently (and I dare say deliberately) ignore the diversity of both erotic imagery and real encounters—Gail Dines made no mention of pornography that does not include women, of which there is plenty in the form of gay male erotica for instance, in her speech on Tuesday—and disingenuously claim to speak for the women who they work so hard to silence, such as the countless sex workers whose lives are devastated by unwanted “rescues”.

So I think that people and feminists in particular need to be ever-vigilant not to let the language of feminism and gender equality be co-opted in order to support anti-women policies, to justify discrimination or censorship, or to enable the imposition of self-righteous moral or religious doctrine on anyone, ever.

Moreover, I think that the information age has made it more critical than ever that people develop information literacy and critical thinking skills. We’re all just people with websites. Go make up your own mind.

Cheers,
-maymay

Two things struck me as I was preparing my reply to Amanda.

First, her questions were incredibly pointed, and it was difficult for me to come up with short answers. I grew increasingly impressed with Amanda’s obvious intellect the more I analyzed the questions. Although she offered to speak with me on the phone in addition to sending me an email with her questions, I chose the email because I knew I’d be busy at my day job.

Looking back on our exchange, I’m glad I asked for an email instead of a phone call because I’m far more eloquent in writing than I am in speech, as regular listeners to Kink On Tap surely know. I had the opportunity to ask for some input from people close to me, including Aida and Emma, who were a great help in getting my thoughts organized enough to make my points clearly.

Second, I noticed that the column Amanda wrote included no content directly from our email exchange. This reifies what I already knew: you do not get to tell the story you want to tell when you speak to news outlets of any sort, whether large and well-known or small and self-published. Instead, you only get to influence it. If you want to tell your story, you damn well better tell it yourself.

It should be noted that Amanda was surely working under both time and length constraints, among others. I thank her for writing her piece, and for being the only journalist I know of to do so after attending a KinkForAll unconference and experiencing it in person, albeit for only a portion of the day. If only KinkForAll’s detractors would show us that courtesy…. (You know who you are.)

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Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Femquake Fallout: Feminism, the Internet and Boobquake (and Brainquake)

Category labels: Communication, Community, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Sexism, Vanilla life, Writing and blogging

Boobquake was hilarious. Above all else, the joke turned media frenzy turned factional feminist debate taught me that the Internet is like a giant game of telephone. No matter what someone says, someone else will misconstrue it as something totally different.

And y’know what? That’s not so terrible. Here’s why.

The Internet is like a giant game of telephone

While misunderstandings and hurt feelings aren’t fun, they’re not the only thing that can result from a game of telephone. Similarly, while misunderstandings and hurt feelings sadly abound in response to Iranian Cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi’s claim that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes (not to mention Pat Robertson’s equally bigoted claim that gay people cause hurricanes)1, a lot of real good did come from Boobquake. As Lissy observed:

watching my facebook statuses I noticed something… boobquake worked for a lot of people who I know don’t spend much time thinking about feminism at all. My very capable and hardworking sister Ginger, takes no shit from anyone but would never be described as a feminist activist[…]. But boobquake? She was onto that, spewing on her facebook status about sexist pigs in a way that made me a proud older sister… she listened to me ranting, all that time I thought she wasn’t listening as a teenager she was!

Of course, baring cleavage in the name of women’s liberation is itself controversial. In short order, Boobquake received criticism from feminists who felt “saddened” by this response. A counter-event, categorized as a “Protest” on Facebook named Brainquake, soon sprung into being. What’s most interesting of all, Brainquake creators Negar Mottahedeh and Golbarg Bashi say that they’ve been in touch with Boobquake instigator Jennifer McCreight, and McCreight says she’s been in touch with the Brainquake creators, and that there’s little (if any) animosity between the three of them.

Responding to factional feminism

Nevertheless, while hanging out on Twitter on Sunday, I saw a seemingly endless stream of negativity about Boobquake from Brainquake supporters. It was being described as “anti-feminist,” and while I personally don’t find boobquake that appealing (although it is funny), I found the negativity spewed Jennifer’s way even less appealing. That’s when I decided I’d break the binary and came up with Femquake. As I wrote when I introduced the idea:

Both breasts and brains are good for humanity and deserve our respect. Don’t coerce women into being proud of one over the other, or feeling ashamed of either! YES WE CAN all get along.

[…]

The core ideal is not a woman’s body or her mind, but her humanity. Decrying women who are proud of their bodies is as oppressive as forcing the ones who aren’t to cover them up. Hailing intellectualism over physical value is as insensitively demonizing as nonconsensual sexualization.

It’s time for women, men, and everyone else to empower one another to live the lives we want to live, free of coercion and abuse, whether modestly dressed or not.

It’s time for a FEMQUAKE!

Jumping on the “b*quake” bandwagon had its benefits. Within hours, the Femquake Facebook page had hundreds of fans—and an equal number of detractors. It seems that you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. And, statistically speaking, that’s precisely the problem with Boobquake, too, as Phil Plait from Discover Magazine wrote:

there are very few huge quakes, and a lot of little ones. We expect to rack up maybe one quake more powerful than magnitude 8 in a year, but on average we get one in the magnitude 6 – 6.9 range every couple of days somewhere in the world, and one in the 5 – 5.9 range something like three to five times every day. That’s every few hours!

And there’s the weakness in the Boobquake plan. […W]ithout defining the time period, the earthquake size, and the region in advance, this can actually reinforce the cleric’s claims! Given the huge tracts of land involved, no matter when women of the world unveil their decolletage, there is bound to be a magnitude 5 quake within an hour or so of the event, and a mag 6 quake within a day.

Jennifer McCreight, Negar Mottahedeh and Golbarg Bashi, and myself have all received criticism for supporting gender justice in our own ways, and the criticism is as diverse as ever. That’s no surprise, and again, I think it’s actually a beautiful thing. Having this diversity empowers people to choose the form of activism that’s right for them.

And if you don’t see what you like, you can self-empower yourself to go make it.

Feminism is about gender equality, and equality requires self-empowerment

That message of self-empowerment is, in my view, what my response to the factionalism over the “*quake” events is all about: Don’t let ideological feminists shame you into covering yourself up, or pressure you into exposing yourself, I wrote. Your body is YOURS. It is yours to show off however you like, whether physically, intellectually, or otherwise.

On that note, let me share with you some of the criticism I’ve received over Femquake. I think the negativity can be illustrative and can offer a wonderful opportunity to practice empowering positivity. If all this hullaballoo over boobquake has shown me one thing, it’s that we all need to practice assuming good faith and responding to offense nonviolenty.

@Custard_Socks says “fuck off with your titpics”

I followed conversation about #Femquake on Twitter. Here’s what @Custard_Socks had to say:

Femquake? Brains and boobs? My sister’s a flat chested idiot but she’s done damn well in a male dominated job, so fuck off with your titpics

(They said it here.)

I responded:

@Custard_Socks #Femquake is feminist solidarity—the idea is that #sexuality is too often divisive. Why be so negative when we could empower?

In answering honestly (I believe), @Custard_Socks said:

@maymaym From the participants on the Femquake Facebook page, feminism means you can brag about your high IQ & big tits. Solidarity, my arse

@maymaym Boasting is empowerment for the selfish.

(They said it here and here.)

At this point, it occurred to me that there probably wasn’t anything I could say to convince this person of Femquake’s intent. I simply don’t know how else to describe Femquake than the way I did on the Femquake Facebook event page:

On Femquake Day, honor a feminist who inspires compassion among different groups of people and who celebrates the value inherent in the diversity of human sexuality. In other words, HONOR FEMINISTS WHO ROCK YOUR WORLD!

Or, just smile at a stranger. It’s good for them, for you, and for our planet. :)

If honoring feminists who rock my world amounts to “brag[gin]” about their high IQ and big tits, well, fuck, I’m in! If smiling at strangers is “boasting” and “selfish,” fuck it, slap my ass and call me narcissistic! Smiling is healthy, and so is being proud of who you are.

Anyway, taking my own advice, my conversation with @Custard_Socks continued with my reply, which I intended just as genuinely as I believe they intended their earlier reply to me:

@Custard_Socks :) I hope you have a fantastic day today and brighten someone’s day. It’d be wonderful if you were able to do that.

But a moment of insight hit me when @Custard_Socks answered back with, @maymaym Are you saying I’m more than likely not capable of that?

“Oh,” I thought to myself, “is that the concern?” Does @Custard_Socks feel so disempowered to bring joy to others that they are so ready to jump to the false belief that others find them incapable of it? Obviously, only @Custard_Socks can answer that, but regardless of this person’s situation, it occurred to me that countless people probably do feel exactly that.

Maybe some of what the knee-jerk negativity in feminist debates needs is someone to say, “Hey, I support you, and I think you can bring this world joy!” (You can read the rest of my conversation with @Custard_Socks here, here, and here.)

Melliferax says, “someone else who is ostensibly on the same side has to go off whining about it? Grumble.”

Femquake got blogged about right alongside Boobquake and Brainquake, just as I’d hoped it would. Of course, not everyone was so enthused. In a comment on one such blog post, Melliferax said:

Femquake… had a very quick look and it just seems like the usual call for equality? How’s that different from, y’know, feminism or good ole humanism? Why is it that every time someone comes up with an idea, like arresting the pope or showing some cleavage, someone else who is ostensibly on the same side has to go off whining about it? Grumble.

Femquake was born out of my unhappiness with the unhappiness many Brainquakers felt towards Boobquakers. So yeah, I guess you could say I was “whining about it.” But is that so terrible?

I mean, if a “call for equality” can come from unhappiness, is saying that the people who advocate for that equality are “whining” really going to help matters? I don’t think so, but I’m not going to belittle you for thinking differently.

If calls for equality stem from whining, then maybe what we need are more people whining! What I think we don’t need, however, is negativity directed at calls for equality. Since you get to choose how you respond, why choose something negative when you could choose something positively empowering?

Millerax says that Femquake “just seems like the usual call for equality,” but as the billions of female-assigned, intersex, transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual, kinky, and queer people will attest, calls for equality is anything but “usual” in far too many parts of the world. I think the absence of more calls to equality in places like Iran is seriously whacked, yo. Don’t you?

Anonymous says, “awesome. a man is leading the femquake charge. […I]t means a little less to me now.”

As I’ve been saying for years, one of the beautiful things about the Internet is that it enables us to let our ideas, words, and actions speak for themselves, without judgements based on age, race, gender, or other characteristics. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a insert-your-feared-identity-here. However, identity really matters to some people.

In a comment on Feminist Mom in Montreal’s Femquake blog post, someone who prefers to remain anonymous said:

awesome. a man is leading the femquake charge. That’s all great and lovely, but I guess I was hoping that it was a woman. If that makes me sexist, well, I guess maybe I am.

Not gonna lie, it means a little less to me now.

The point is still there and the point is a good one, but meh…some dude on the internet leading the charge on us uniting our boobs and our brains is just, IDK, ironic.

Thanks for the help, though.

First, Anonymous, you’re very welcome! :D I’m glad to help bring about a world where gender justice is a reality!

That being said, I have to wonder why my being a man means that Femquake loses some measure of respect in your eyes. As a man, I know that it’s very difficult for men—including myself, at times—to stand up for the rights of women. Y’see, I could choose not to. I could go about my life content in the knowledge that because no one questions me when I check “M” when replying to Facebook’s “Gender” question,2 I have privileges that someone who checks “F” may never have.

And y’know what? That’s a pretty sweet deal for me and the other “M”‘s, and a pretty crappy one for all the “F”‘s.

That’s why it’s absolutely baffling to me that when men stand up for gender equality, it somehow means less than when women do it. The reality is that no matter who is standing up for gender equality, it means the same thing: that we are all working towards the same goal of equality and opportunity for all souls on this planet, regardless of what body those souls inhabit.

So, while Anonymous may find it “ironic” that a man like me came up with Femquake, I find it equally ironic that someone who wants to support gender equality would devalue an effort to support gender justice due to the gender of that effort’s founder.

Strengthen love, not shame

There are, of course, plenty of other negative and positive responses to Femquake, and I’m thrilled to see that the Femquake page is still getting fans. After all, communication is inherently imperfect because otherwise we wouldn’t need it. And so I think, in the end, all this diversity is beautiful—it’s a reflection of the diversity inherent in all of you!

Ultimately, regardless of whether someone supports me or tries to put me down, I’m going to work on just being happy. I want to spread joy in the world. :) I know it can be hard, and I struggle to smile sometimes but, with your help, I’m learning how.

Thank you for all the criticism, the support, the encouragement, the denigration, and responses. Thank you for keeping the conversation going, and for talking to one another, and to me! Thank you for turning a sexist comment by an Iranian religious leader and a boob joke by a young feminist into an opportunity to promote peace and happiness and understanding and unity and self-empowerment and beauty and intelligence!

Now go and enjoy life, because working towards bringing pleasure and joy and equality and opportunity to everyone—everyone—is what feminism is all about!

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  1. I think Pat is wrong about the whole hurricane thing. I think Teh Gehys actually cause volcanos. Don’t you remember the recent Icelandic volcano that halted air travel in Europe? I mean, those Frenchies are all sexual deviants! I say we need a #Gaycano experiment! Go, Internet, go! [↩]
  2. Facebook really ought to change that label to “Sex,” not “Gender,” since those two words are not actually interchangeable. See also: Gender and Technology. [↩]

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Wednesday, March 24, 2010

The Salvation Army incites personal attacks against me; a blog reply

Category labels: Emotions, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Vanilla life, Writing and blogging

Update: The attacks against me originated from Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks; the Salvation Army republished and more widely distributed Donna M. Hughes’ and Margaret Brooks’ vicious insinuations. See the bottom of this post for details.

Acting on what you believe in is an easy thing to do. At first.

But then mean, angry, or frightened people insinuate nasty behavior on your part, misquote you seemingly on purpose, and paint you out to be a nightmarish creature. A sex slaver. A child molester. They’ll call you or what you do slimy, putrid, decaying, nasty, trash.

Or at least, they might if you were me, what you believed in was that everyone on Earth deserves the capability to access public discussions about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life, and they were the (rather inappropriately named for this particular initiative of theirs) Initiative Against Sexual Trafficking, a branch of the Salvation Army, or its mailing list subscribers.

Yesterday, I learned that the Salvation Army apparently sent out an email blast that, among other things, seems to have viscously attacked KinkForAll as an idea and, beyond inappropriate, attacked me personally. At a minimum, they evidently incited at least one blogger to name me a pedophile and to say things like the following:

Today I got a message from the chairperson of the Initiative Against Sexual Trafficking, an arm of the Salvation Army. […] As part of their mailing list, I receive information on legislation, programming, etc. as a way of becoming informed about the issue.

Well, I’d rather not have been informed about the following issue. I share it with you as a way of expressing deep sorrow.

[…]

KinkforAll, an “organization” begun by middle-school drop-out ["maymay"], recently sponsored an event on the Brown University campus in Providence, Rhode Island.

[…]

["maymay"] is, quite simply, nothing short of a pedophile […] I really believe that this ["maymay"] character has one of the sickest, darkest minds that I’ve ever heard of. […] All that matters to him are his own dark kicks.

How dare he? More importantly, how dare we? Where is the rage for what this man is trying to do to our children? Where are the prosecutors, working to toss him behind bars?

It goes on quite a ways, and there’s no link love for obvious reasons. You can Google for the source if you’d like; it’s not hard. Obviously, I’d be very interested to read the email that incited this post, but I’m not subscribed to their mailing list and I can’t figure out how to get on the mailing list or view their archives from their web site. (I’d give them an F on their transparency report card if I were grading.)

To this particular blogger’s credit (her name is Marie, and she is “completely in love with Jesus,” according to her blog’s “about” page), she took a deep breath and, in a followup post earlier today, retracted her accusations. She writes:

it was wrong of me to liken ["maymay"] to a pedophile. I can’t say that. I don’t know that.

[…]

As I was writing the piece, it began, in my mind, as a factual presentation, and then devolved into an emotional scream. I had a name that I could latch on to, as way of being able to pin all the blame on someone for something that makes me hurt. See, it’s really easy to cross that line between judging an action and judging a person. The problem, to me, is a whole lot bigger than this one person or his personal opinions.

So, I’m not ashamed to say that that was wrong and that I’m sorry, both to you who might read this blog and to ["maymay"] himself. That wasn’t careful writing, nor was it me at my best. Actually, I was engaging in the kind of writing that I feel very strongly that I’m not supposed to do.

I’m impressed with the personal integrity Marie has shown in her second post. Sadly, that’s very often lacking in people and so it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that the hateful sentiments Marie expressed in her first post are not unique to her. That’s a frightening thought.

Let me be plain. It is fucking terrifying to be publicly slandered by people you don’t know, who fail to get their facts correct about you or your actions, who are incited by a faceless, nameless insinuator that refuses to engage with you. It’s enraging to be accused of doing the very things you want to prevent. These Salvation Army people scare me.

I am scared, and I am angry. But, y’know what?

Being scared and angry isn’t mutually exclusive with standing up for what you believe in. So I’m going to stand up and dare to say that access to education, including accurate, rational, and non-judgemental sexuality information, is a fundamental human right, that everyone on Earth deserves to have their human rights met from the moment they are born, and for that reason it is important that everyone’s right to access educational resources they’ve demonstrated intent to access is upheld. Period.

I think it’s tragic that people who ostensibly want to do such good in the world, like Marie and even more like the authors of that defaming email, end up doing such awful things. But nothing in our lives is forever changeless, so when I saw the second breath that Marie took, I risked a blog comment. Following, in case it doesn’t get approved on Marie’s blog, is the comment I submitted in full.

As you read it, regardless of who you are, please ask yourself this one simple question: What can I do in this situation that will enable other people to live, learn, and be joyous? The answer to your question is how you will empower others. Now your job is to find a way to keep that happening without you, because only when your presence is no longer required have you actually succeeded in self-empowering others.

Hi Marie,

In your comment above, you poignantly wrote some words I agree with. Specifically, you said:

I look around me, at women specifically, and I don’t see the promised liberation. I see girls getting pregnant at 14. I see women starving themselves or getting all sorts of surgery in order to be “beautiful.” I see wives reduced to playing porn in the bedroom, because their husbands aren’t aroused without it. That’s what makes me uncomfortable and sad. I believe that women are absolutely equal to men[…].

I still see a lot of this too, and it angers me, too. (Did you know that potentially unsafe labia dye products are on the market? Sigh.) It angers me because the reality you described with those words actively hurts me, just as much as it hurts millions of other men (although too few of my fellow men seem to understand this) and it hurts women, and it hurts children. I’m working very hard in the way I know best to eradicate sexual misinformation, shaming, and abuse. With respect to our goals as I understand yours from your quote, above, I don’t see a very big difference between us. :)

You mentioned that you’re going to keep your previous post up. If you’re going to do that, then I’d appreciate the opportunity to address some statements you wrote as “factual presentation” but are, in fact, incorrect.

First, you wrote:

KinkForAll […] recently sponsored an event on the Brown University campus in Providence, Rhode Island.

To be precise, it was the Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council (SHEEC), a student group at Brown University, that sponsored the KinkForAll Providence unconference. Neither KinkForAll nor Brown University were sponsoring the event. You can learn more about SHEEC from their web site.

Second, you wrote:

The specific goal of the event was to foster an acceptance of bondage, discipline and sadomasochism – as well as promoting an “anything goes” attitude.

In reality, I have personally loudly spoken out that the goal of KinkForAll events should never be specific to an acceptance of bondage, discipline and sadomasochism. The true goal of KinkForAll unconferences are to inspire conversations about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life. (Consider reading the short “KinkForAll” about page, if you haven’t yet.)

“The intersection of sexuality with the rest of life” covers a lot of ground, and has included things like healthy cooking and eating (at KinkForAll New York City 2), free speech and privacy technologies (at KinkForAll San Francisco), and a host of other topics, but for some reason people like the folks at the Salvation Army seem particularly excited to spotlight discussions about consensual sadomasochism. Moreover, they say those topics are my focus, when they have never been my focus at KinkForAll unconferences at all. That’s very misleading and I find it small of them to show such carelessness in misrepresenting me so blatantly.

Have you considered the possibility that some of these people are conjuring some demons from their own fears, rather than from reality?

Third, you wrote:

Each person attending the event was required to participate in the many discussion panels

That’s not true, either. Participation can include speaking up in discussion panels if one so chooses, but it can also mean helping put out chairs, bringing home cooked food (pot-luck lunch is yummier than catered food!), taking out the trash, or just sitting in and listening or taking notes or something. Really, we have a whole page with suggestions of how to participate; the unconferences are expressly designed as open to the public spaces where people can feel physically safe and free to abstain from anything they’re not up to doing. :)

Fourth, you wrote:

["maymay"] insisted to school officials – both at Brown and on other campuses where he has been allowed to hold events – that children be allowed to attend. [… He] claims to find it “heartwarming” that at least one minor has been officially recorded as having attended one of the events in New York. […] Responding to a hypothetical question about what he would do should a nine-year-old child show up at a KinkforAll, ["maymay"] wrote that he would hold this child to be “amazing” and would help him get connected with the group.

I’ve actually never spoken to school officials about KinkForAll so, again, I question the reliability of your source. Also, I think the minor you’re referring to who has been “officially recorded” was a local high school student in Washington, D.C., not New York City. I found it “heartwarming” that she chose to lead a discussion about being in high school and working with school administrators on sexuality issues at school. Again, you might do well to follow up with whatever your source is, since your information seems littered with errors.

As for the “amazing” quote—a quote of one word—you attribute to me, what you’re likely referring to were the conversations I had with fellow event planners where I insisted that an “open to the public” event, like KinkForAll unconferences are, should by definition not restrict the ability of anyone who shows an informed intent to participate from doing so, regardless of race, religious belief, or age. It would be amazing if young people were empowered to be free of coercion about what they should or should not do, want, or think. Perhaps that way, for instance, young girls won’t be swayed to purchase labia dye by the very industry that profits from inflicting them with a poor self-image, y’know?

By the way, all these conversations between KinkForAll participants (not “members,” since there is no such thing as KinkForAll membership), including the one you used a one-word quote of me in, are all publicly visible. Rather than get yourself worked up on factually questionable or severely sensationalistic material, I invite you to read the conversations I have about this yourself. I’m actually relatively boring if you’re willing to listen before you pass judgement. :)

On a personal note:

When you likened me to the things I revile, you hurt me deeply (wouldn’t that hurt you?), so I thank you for your apology, and I gratefully accept it. I urge you to consider the possibility that you were not the only person who was incited to an “emotional scream” from reading whatever it is you read about me, although perhaps you are one of a fewer number with enough integrity to retract a personal attack after making it.

With that in mind, I hope that when you see others so eager to cast blame and throw stones based on what they think they “know,” as you almost did, that you stand up with a calm, brilliant voice of reason and remind everyone involved to take a deep breath. That would be truly heroic.

Again, if you’re going to leave the previous post up, it would be heartwarming if you could at least include a link to the sources that incited your remarks as well as a link to this post (or even directly to this comment), so that you empower future readers of your blog to follow the trail themselves instead of taking solely my word or yours on the issue. Give a man a fish versus teach a man to fish, and all that; enabling your readers to make up their own minds about the issue by providing links to source material would be grand. :)

Anyway, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for considering me in a less furor-driven light this second time around. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you’d be interested in having a more in-depth dialogue. I’m very easy to find online, and I’d welcome your voice in whatever conversations I have in public spaces.

Cheers,
-["maymay"] :)

Update (March 25, 2010): This morning I awoke to find that my comment on Marie’s post was published and a rather thoughtful reply was left. I think it’s so worthwhile that I’m going to republish it here, along with my as-yet-unapproved reply to her reply (which I’m thinking will be the last in the thread from me for now).

["maymay"],

Thank you for your reply.

First, I would post a link to the source whence I garnered this information, but it came to me in an email format, which I have sense deleted. (I’m rather fanatical about clearing my inbox.) I have attempted to find the article online, but have been unsuccessful thus far.

I did actually read most of the information on the KinkforAll site. I can, in one sense, appreciate that you and others desire to see people educated on the topic of sex and sexuality. Realistically, I think that this is something that everyone, on all sides of the topic, can agree upon. I, for one, when I have children, would like to see them be comfortable with the fact that they are sexual beings.

However, I son’t think what we have deemed as “education,” on whatever end of the spectrum, really IS education. I don’t think it’s enough to tell someone, “Don’t have sex” without telling them why that’s a good idea, and nor do I think it’s enough to say, “Do what you want” without addressing the pitfalls.

As I said before, I’m not a perfect person, and I do realize that what I wrote was littered with ranting toward you, which I am sorry for. On my end, I just feel incredibly frustrated. After accepting the grace so freely offered my by Christ, I began to see very clearly that all the things I’d been told about sex – again, on whatever end of the spectrum – had quite clearly missed the point. “Don’t do it” with not explanation leads to rebellion or shaming. “Do whatever” leads to heartbreak. That has been my experience.

I think that we are sexual beings, yes. This means that our sexuality is part of everything – body, mind, heart, soul. I don’t think we can separate, hard as we might try, the one from the other. I think we have done ourselves a great disservice in trying, and in taking sex from the private sphere and injecting it into the public.

I don’t mean having honest discussions about sex and sexuality in a safe environment. Frankly, I also think this issue has a lot to with a lack of personal responsibility regarding parenting. Children shouldn’t be left to the devices of the world around them to learn about sex. What I do mean is the constant bombardment of images, messages, etc. about how to do it, when to do it, how to look when you do it, what’s good, what’s bad, and so on. I feel that KinkforAll has contributed to this barrage. That’s likely something that we’ll just have disagree on.

Again, sir, thank you for your comment.

My reply to Marie’s comment follows:

Hi Marie,

More briefly than my last comment, as I don’t want to overstay my welcome on your blog, let me just say that I can wholeheartedly understand the frustration you describe because I feel a lot of it, too. As an aside, one of the things that helped me start thinking about why everything I was told was so off-point was this essay by Dr. Marty Klein, called “Censorship and the Fear of Sexuality.” I highly recommend it.

I began to see very clearly that all the things I’d been told about sex – again, on whatever end of the spectrum – had quite clearly missed the point.

Exactly. EXACTLY. I’m so glad to hear you say that because I agree completely. As hard as it might be to believe, my involvement with the KinkForAll unconferences were born out of my desire to see my “end of the spectrum” do a better job of actually educating about sex and relationships.

I think we have done ourselves a great disservice in trying, and in taking sex from the private sphere and injecting it into the public.

I don’t mean having honest discussions about sex and sexuality in a safe environment.

May I ask, then, what do you mean? And also, what do you think “inspiring conversations about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life” refers to at KinkForAll unconferences, which expressly and strictly disallow sexualized acts, if not, y’know, having honest discussions about sex and sexuality in a safe environment? Maybe what some people are imagining isn’t what happens there and maybe watching some of the many video recordings from KinkForAll unconferences would better arm you with knowledge than reading text on a web site, even the KinkForAll web site. (In light of our conversation about “what we’re told about sex,” I would recommend this talk: On Dichotomies That (No Longer) Jail Me.)

In other words, I am generally of the opinion that to think freely, we have to be able to speak freely. The solution to “bad speech” is never censorship, but rather more speech. That’s why I’m so frightened by the attacks the Salvation Army has made or incited from well-meaning people like you, and possibly others still to come; those sentiments don’t inspire conversation, they incite violence whether physical or emotional and they absolutely, definitely, shut down the opportunity for honest dialogue.

Anyway, yeah, that’s why I don’t understand the vitriol with which the Salvation Army has attacked me, and why I’m frightened that there are so many people less civilly mannered than you. I hope, of course, that you’ll help inspire conversation and civil behavior when you see the opposite happening.

Thanks also for trying to find the source you quoted. If you ever do find it, I’d be happy to see it linked on these blog posts. And of course, you know where to reach me; consider my door always open to you. Always.

Although Marie can’t find the source, I did learn that on March 20th, two people by the names of Margaret Brooks and Donna M. Hughes published a defaming bulletin about me that cites KinkForAll Providence heavily, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that these are the same alarmists I referred to before. The bulletin is on a web site misnamed Citizens Against Trafficking. It should, at least in this instance, be called “Citizens Against Sexuality Freedom and Discussion.” (I move to rename and will from here on out refer to the group as CASFD. Again, no link love. You can find it with Google.)

To Margaret Brooks and Donna M. Hughes: I personally invite you to speak with me by replying to this post or the Open Thread I posted a while back. That invitation stands at least until before you call me “dangerous to the community” or publish similar sentiments a second time.

To provide a bit of context for those that don’t know, these are the same people who barricaded Megan Andelloux, also named in the bulletin, from opening The Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health a few months back. Megan presented a talk about the issues surrounding the opening for The Center at KinkForAll Providence, which I encourage everyone to watch, below.

Sex Panic in Pawtucket – KinkForAll Providence from maymay on Vimeo.

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! Learn more about Megan Andelloux at http://OhMegan.com and about the Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health at http://TheCSPH.org

Update (March 25th, 2010): Marie took down her original post today. To wit, she wrote:

I have decided to remove the original piece that I posted here, and encourage those of you who may read this blog to peruse the above listed article for yourselves, as well as doing other research.

The “above listed article” Marie linked to is the bulletin published by the Citizens Against Sexuality Freedom and Discussion (CASFD), that I mentioned earlier. This confirms my suspicions about the sources of these attacks. Again, I challenge Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks (shown below) to actually reply to this Open Thread.

Margaret Brooks
Margaret Brooks
Donna M. Hughes
Donna M. Hughes


As an aside, I do wonder why “Margaret Brooks” is much more easily findable on Google as “Margaret Landman.” Perhaps ‘Landman’ is a maiden name. Or a pseudonym. You can Google for these people as well; that’s how I found the pictures.

Update (March 27th, 2010): Those following this conversation may find my next blog post, titled Addressing Donna M. Hughes and Margaret Brooks’ concerns over KinkForAll unconferences, worth reading.

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Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Published Strap-on Sex Essay; Financial Support not Financial Compensation

Category labels: Male sexuality, Masculinity, Personal experience, Sex, Sex toys, Strap-ons and dildos, Writing and blogging

Having cast aside the traditional mode of economic security—a 9-5 job—I now find myself with a slew of new opportunities. Now it’s up to me to start following up on them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sunday, December 13, 2009

Please read poignant commentary on Hope Witsell’s suicide

Category labels: Politics of sex, Sexism, Writing and blogging

This morning, I woke up and followed a link to some incredibly poignant commentary about Hope Witsell’s suicide, a topic I tried and failed to talk about the way I wanted to on the most recent Kink On Tap episode. Thankfully, I now have Sylvia’s words to put to my feelings. In What happened to Hope Witsell, Sylvia writes:

It was not that, as this putrid “news” article disgustingly asserts, “The downward spiral of Hope’s life was unstoppable.”

If everyone I know who had a picture of their boobs on the internet before their 18th birthday killed themselves, I’d have a lot of dead friends. I wouldn’t be around to remember them, though, since I’d be dead too.

It wasn’t SEXTING.

It was you, adults, all the adults in her life.

I feel that the full blog post is simply required reading.

On Twitter, Cos pointed me at another commentary from The Curvature. He sent this commentary to Andrew Meacham, the author of the original news story. Although I tried, I simply couldn’t read through Mr. Meacham’s article because of the overwhelming anger I felt at each turn where he (and the numerous commenters on the article) twisted this story around to blame Hope herself, to stigmatize her because she was stigmatized, to shame her for being a victim, to paint her as the one to be punished for her “impetuous move.”

We as a society have become so good at victimizing victims, at absolving ourselves of any wrongdoing, of telling ourselves all the lies we need to hear to make everyone believe “there was nothing we could do,” when in fact we did nothing at best, or were the active ingredient in creating the terminal disease of sexual shaming at worst. If you can’t see that there is a parasitic insistence of a karmic theory of she-got-what-she-deserved so insidiously lodged into the minds and hearts of so many people, then you may not have Hope’s—and other youth like Hope’s—best interests in mind. For god’s sake, please look again.

In her TEDTalk, gang rape survivor and real-life hero Sunitha Krishnan, says:

I was 15 when I was gang raped by 8 men. I don’t remember the rape part of it so much as much as the anger part of it. Yes, there were 8 men who defiled me, raped me, but that didn’t go into my consciousness. I never felt like a rape victim then or now. But what lingered from then to now—I’m 40 today—is this huge outrageous anger. [For] two years I was ostracized, I was stigmatized, I was isolated because I was a victim. […] We, as a civil society, we have Ph.D.s in victimizing a victim.

(Skip to 2:45 for the quote.)

Back on Twitter, Cos urged me to write to Mr. Meacham. So I wrote him this, which I want to share here:

Dear Mr. Meacham,

I am writing to direct your attention to some very poignant commentary regarding your article in the St. Petersburg Times printed on the TampaBay.com website covering the tragic suicide of Hope Witsell.

The commentary I hope you will read is here:

http://sylviasproblem.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/what-happened-to-hope-witsell/

I believe the commentary I linked above is extremely important because it expressly discusses the angle with which news stories like this are covered and provides some insight into how to do so in order to help the Witsell and other families in the future.

It is my sincerest hope that you read the above commentary with an open mind.

Thank you very much.

This is about all I can take before breakfast time. I hope the rest of my day isn’t quite so depressing.

Update: Mr. Meacham replied to my email, although I won’t republish his email here as I never asked if I could do so. My understanding of his reply is that, as a reporter, he feels it is only appropriate to report on things that actually occurred (i.e., tangible events), and not to make any implications about their cause or effects. This is a very appropriate thing for a reporter to be doing.

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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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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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Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Why MaleSubmissionArt.com Doesn’t Have Comments

Category labels: Male sexuality, Politics of sex, Technology, Writing and blogging

Over the past few months, I’ve been regularly updating a site called MaleSubmissionArt.com. It’s a photo blog in which I curate erotic imagery from around the Internet for a singularly directed purpose: to challenge the prevailing stereotypes of what submissive men look like, want, and feel—stereotypes that I believe actively undermine the erotic fulfillment of submissive men and anyone who likes them.

Since I began posting, Male Submission Art has gotten an unexpectedly high response from across the Internet. When I started, running Internet searches for such imagery was a frustrating prospect at best. Now, the URL itself has thousands of mentions on other web sites, as I’ve traveled across the United States I’ve been recognized by name if not by face for that site by people I don’t know, and I’ve gotten numerous private emails from people who have written to me personally expressing gratitude for the existence of the site. (That, by the way, is fucking awesome! Thank you all for your emails, even and perhaps especially those of you who simply write to say thanks.)

Many of those emails begin with an idle wondering: why can’t I write comments on the posts at MaleSubmissionArt.com itself? There are a number of reasons for this, but one reason stands above all others: because MaleSubmissionArt.com’s goal is to obsolete itselfmake itself obsolete (thanks, Orlando). Now, let me explain.

I started the site because the Internet didn’t contain enough collected imagery, writing, and thought about the intersection of masculine gender roles and power exchange, specifically with regard to submissive men. Unable to easily create my own visual media surrounding that topic, I chose instead to scour the Internet’s existing pornographic content (for literally hours a day, by the way) trying to find appropriate images for the site (and if you’re moved to do so, help is appreciated). By bringing in content from elsewhere and shining a spotlight onto it, I hoped to inspire thought and discussion about the topics at hand.

But still, why no comments? With Male Submission Art, I don’t want to provide a place for such discussion, since such places already exist in the form of the noisy blogosphere, the “twitter”-verse, and real-world discussion engines like KinkForAll. I don’t want people to comment on MaleSubmissionArt.com because then that site becomes a bottleneck—a central, single source of content created by only one group of people: people who read this one site.

This seems ridiculous to me. In cyberspace, where copying is cheap, I want people to see the images, take the images and the text, and redistribute them elsewhere. I want to make a virus so contagious and so invasive to the rottenness of “femdom” monotony that the ideas and concepts I bring up on MaleSubmissionArt.com posts spread to the furthest reaches of sexuality discourse. When you start a wildfire, you want the wind to carry the fire into fuel; I want MaleSubmissionArt.com to be the kindling, not the fire. I want a wildfire so wide that it surrounds stereotypical porn producers such that they can’t help but feel the heat.

To do this, I need to spread content, not centralize it. If I make a place for people to create content on MaleSubmissionArt.com, I am mistakenly containing the wildfire. This is why I’m constantly encouraging people to copy what I write, why I’m thrilled every time I see someone quoting the site, or when I see an image that first made it onto the Internet thanks to a reader suggestion. Together, we’re raising the signal.

So again, what can you do instead of comment? Here are some suggestions:

  • If you have a blog—any kind of blog or web site—literally copy-and-paste the content from MaleSubmissionArt.com and paste it on your site: you are not stealing from MaleSubmissionArt.com. Then, in the same post, write your own thoughts about the image and/or the accompanying text and then be sure to include a link to the original post. By adding the link, your blog post will end up on my Internet radar and I’ll see it within a few days or a week. I prefer to comment on your posts than have you comment on mine.
  • If for some reason you can’t copy the content or add links, perhaps for legal restrictions such as Adrian Lang encountered in his (German) blog post (English translation), then merely the mention of the phrase “MaleSubmissionArt.com” without a link will also make it onto my Internet radar eventually. Moreover, it’s less important that you talk to me about your ideas of masculine submission and more important that you talk to others who have not yet been exposed to the notions you’re developing. If you really need my input, ping me via another channel; I’m eminently findable online.
  • Failing any of these options, email me at malesubmissionart@gmail.com. This is a relatively opaque communications channel, so naturally its lack of easy transparency bugs me. That said, even if I don’t reply to them all, I do still read every single email I get.
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Monday, March 23, 2009

KinkForAll and the Evolution of Sexuality Communities

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

Sexuality communities need to evolve or they’ll die. You probably don’t need me to remind you of how hard a time fetish shops, nightclubs, non-profit activist groups, community centers, sex-ed funds, and other sexuality-based initiatives are having right now. Venues are expensive, a cultural war on sex rages fiercely with targeted attacks against sexual freedom, and sexuality community groups are having increasing difficulty engaging younger generations. And that’s not the half of it.

When I think about the world around us and the role of marginalized sexualities such as BDSM, polyamory, transsexuality, gender queerness, and others, I’m reminded of Professor Charles Xavier’s opening lines to the original X-Men movie:

Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.

So, evolve or die. But evolve into what? Unconferences like KinkForAll are the next evolutionary leap forward with regards to how people will learn and talk about what-it-is-that-we-do.

Admittedly, that’s a bold statement. “Evolutionary leap forward” sounds like something ripe either for stereotypical hollywood films or esoteric scientific white papers. Thing is, our lives and our sex is filled to the brim with influences from many disparate sources, such as blockbuster motion pictures and scientific white papers. However, despite having a venerable Horn of Plenty for our sexuality palettes, traditional sexuality conferences and community organizations have remained stalwartly segregated from these influences and—worse—even from each other.

There are problems—deep-seated, gigantic, and incredibly frustrating problems—with the way we as a community and a culture present sex and sexuality to one another and to the next generation. These things need to change, because the world around us is changing. Somehow, despite all this upheaval, our sexuality communities are trapped inside aristocratic institutions that more often act with an interest in risk-avoidance instead of value-creation. Perhaps these organizations’ timid, closeted behavior used to exist for a good reason; membership meant association and building social walls kept the predators on the other side, but that system is feudalism and those days are over.

KinkForAll offers a new, much-needed outlet that can not only radically transform sex education for both mainstream and niche communities, but also revitalize many grass-roots community organizations themselves. By making it possible to bring together influences from all corners of life into a melting pot of sexuality discussion, we unlock the as-yet-untapped value that the sex communities have failed to harness.

The current structure of sexuality organizations is institutionalized to the point of ego-centric gridlock. This can be illustrated by examining the principles on which KinkForAll is founded, since they highlight some weaknesses in these other structures:

  • At a KinkForAll, there are no spectators, only participants. Attendees must give a talk or presentation, or help with one. This is called sharing and we like it.

    For far too long, information about sex has been under one kind of stranglehold or another. Even within sexuality subcultures, who can present, where, and why, has focused very strongly on the currency of the day. Most recently, that currency was reputation, and it created an elitist aristocracy who unwittingly monopolized the very thing they claimed to want to make free: having sex, and how we do that. When reputation becomes more valuable than results, egos prevent progress.

  • At a KinkForAll, anyone can present, on any topic related to sexuality. You do not necessarily have to teach a new skill or idea. You might share an experience, review a product, or read a poem. The goal is to start a discussion, make connections, and exchange knowledge.

    All such activities are valuable, yet too long sidelined or actively discouraged in sexuality circles. Our reasons to wall our sex away from the rest of our life are disappearing one after the other, and we should do what we can to live un-closeted lives in every way we can. Moreover, the amazing potential within inter-community spaces is astonishingly under-appreciated. In fact, I argue such potential is way more valuable than any single organization can ever become.

  • KinkForAll is free (as in beer) and free (as in libre). One of the things I’ve been frustrated with for a long time is the utter lack of accessibility to young people when it comes to topics of sexuality. If a young person (or any person of any age) wishes to engage the wider sex-positive community in the places where it has its discussions, this comes with a terribly high price tag.

    Sexuality conferences run by the sex communities are typically large, expensive, and very intimidating. Many people, not just young people, simply don’t have several hundred dollars and a week’s time to dish out going to sexuality events. This extremely high monetary cost creates insurmountable socioeconomic barriers to many people’s pursuit of sexual freedom because it bars them from obtaining the technical information and the social connections they need. Freedom isn’t just about principles, it’s about actions; enabling people to involve themselves (what we know of as “volunteering,” though I strongly prefer participating) isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the entire point.

None of this negates the fact that older, larger, and more rigid organizations and events have their place. When done well, they can provide spaces for in-depth exploration. That said, there are many places where they will continue to fail to do what newer ideas like KinkForAll will succeed in doing. Audacia Ray summarized this as well, saying:

[KinkForAll] is the perfect event to go to if you’ve always wanted to check out a sex/kink related conference but are afraid that you’ll be swarmed by naked people who are not aesthetically to your liking. It’s the perfect event to go to if you’ve always wanted to check out a sex/kink event but think you don’t know anything or won’t be part of the in crowd. It’s the perfect event to go to if you are in [the area] but have no money and are curious about this kind of event. There are lots of reasons I’m going, but the clothes-on, free, open reasons are my main ones.

The evolution of our sexuality communities from walled gardens to freely and safely traversable pathways like this is hard because it threatens the status-quo, perhaps especially if they are struggling just to survive. Sadly, if their heads are indeed placed firmly in the sand and their heels dug into their risk-avoidance behavior, they will continue to struggle. Of course, they’re struggling for a reason: as Boymeat points out, I love that [KinkForAll] is doing something new and unique in NYC, because I have to say, most of the stuff [the scene's] been doing isn’t working. (Sic.)

KinkForAll is new, and very young, but—and there’s no doubt about this—it’s here to stay. The response to the first-ever KinkForAll unconference, KinkForAll New York City wildly surpassed the expectations that my other unorganizers and I had. As Sara Eileen said,

I have to say how gleeful I am over the entire thing, conceived and brought to being as it was, in less than 3 months and with us on the other side of the world.

[…]

[Maymay] and I expected perhaps 40 attendees. There were over 100.

I had worried that we wouldn’t fill the schedule grid. There were 45 different presentations.

We started with no money and figured we would pay for what we needed ourselves. Over $1000 dollars were donated.

I wasn’t sure we’d have everything we needed. In the end, we were overly resourced; extra projectors, kosher and vegetarian and gluten-free food, gallons of drinking water that appeared seemingly from nowhere.

As I said at the end of the day when I stood on the stage, “our cup overflows.”

My analysis of this is simple:

There’s no question that this kind of event is something the sexuality communities at large really need. It’s not just BDSM people, but poly people, transfolk, queers, butches and femmes, and everyone else who takes part in public, social sexuality-related spaces obviously want to see happen. I’ve personally already heard from folks in Washington DC and Toronto who are interested in replicating similar events, and through several other channels multiple people in San Francisco have also expressed interest.

To borrow from Sascha’s analysis, unconferences like KinkForAll create a new, less intimidating platform for new generations:

I think that the unconference trend signifies something greater—an evolution in the sex and kink positive communities in how we come together and how we exchange information. Don’t get me wrong, I think that more structured events such as TESFest and Dark Odyssey still have their place. But these spaces provide a new, less intimidating platform for new generations of sex geeks, kinksters, activists, educators, and aspiring educators.

More specifically and perhaps even more powerfully, the platform itself is what is being created. It’s a platform for education, for friendship, and for activism the likes of which has never been available to sexuality outlets before. Emily Rutherford describes it similarly, emphasizing KinkForAll’s ability to bring disperse communities together:

Basically, KFANYC was a conference—a vehicle for members of the various sexuality communities in New York to come together, talk, and learn from each other.

Emily also highlights the fact that KinkForAll is engaging the participation of communities and academics of all stripes, even from outside the walled gardens of sociosexual circles:

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 and didn’t have the same standards of format and presentation that academic conferences do. I, as a first-year college student, was able to participate, but so were people who didn’t finish high school and people with graduate degrees. KFANYC very nearly, I think it’s safe to say, made academia accessible to everyone, which is an important thing that those of us entrenched in the ivory tower should be doing. Academic modes are a sort of subculture of analyzing and presenting information, but that doesn’t mean they have to be elitist—just different from, say, journalism, or casual conversation. I think that as much as KFANYC bridged gaps between disparate sexuality communities, it bridged gaps between different registers of discussion, taking academese down a peg while applying a theoretical and philosophical level to more casual conversations.

(Emphasis mine.)

Time and again the same themes crop up. As Axe wrote a while ago,
there will be presentations on topics that you may not find at other events. New platforms bring new ideas in new ways, which in turn bring new people, who are needed to keep moving us to where we want to go. StacyCat commented on her experience, saying It got me really excited about the scene and education and life again.

So, an old idea was reborn: make free events for the sexuality communities, and use them to effect a paradigm shift in the way we present marginalized sexuality issues like BDSM, transsexuality, gender queerness, asexuality, and others to the world at large. The rebirth freed us from the constraints of current systems and organizations. With the knowledge that such rebirth is healthy and risk-avoidance is itself inherently risky, to use Boymeat’s words again, the structure has been built entirely to prevent any power plays, and is focused on autonomy and transparency.

We gave the idea a name, KinkForAll, and then we gave it massive amounts of our time and effort. I made a web site for KinkForAll, Sara Eileen started talking about the idea with our friends, who (with our encouragement) started talking about it with their friends, and on and on the cycle went until we had people we didn’t know wanting—and instantly able—to participate.

So where do we go now? We’re continuing to put recordings of the presentations given at the event online so that anyone with an Internet connection can freely get some of that value. Our goal has always been to make an easily-digestible packet that we can give to others to help them recreate the positive energy and value that came from KinkForAll New York City. To that end, I’ve been working on writing a KinkForAll unorganizer’s guide.

Of course, nothing is as supportive as actual participation, and so I’m talking with people who have shown interest and initiative to run KinkForAll events in Washington DC as I hope to also do for Toronto and San Francisco soon after that. Suddenly, there’s grass-roots momentum around making such content available on a global scale, for free, because the infrastructure already exists in the form of the Internet.

But, as Sara said, It’s out in the world now. Anyone can take it on, and up. Many participants at KinkForAll New York City travel frequently to DC and elsewhere, and I encourage those uniquely experienced people to spread the idea with their actions. And that’s the ultimate take-away point: Sexual freedom is for everyone. But you have to take it and run with it yourself.

Interested? Learn more about KinkForAll at http://KinkForAll.org, our Frequently Asked Questions page, or our public mailing list.

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Saturday, February 28, 2009

Jane Says We’re Quality and Original, So I Built Her A Plugin

Category labels: Reviews, Technology, Writing and blogging

Recently, my blog was favorably reviewed by the good folks at JanesGuide.com. For those who don’t know, JanesGuide is one of the oldest and most reputable adult website review sites on the Internet, dating all the way back to 1997 (which was interestingly about when I started establishing myself online, too). When you get a nice review from them, it’s customary to let other people know with a little award icon image that links back to Jane’s site.

If you’re not reading solely through my newsfeed, then you may have noticed the JanesGuide icon I’ve (admittedly somewhat haphazardly) put into my sidebar. That icon is the (old school) “quality & original” associated with this kind review of my writing here:

In an age where it seems as though “sex bloggers” have become a dime a dozen, Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed is a breath of fresh, intellectual, well-thought out air. MayMay is the writer of this site, and while it hasn’t been updated as much recently, it is chock full of interesting news about a variety of events/news stories in the field of sexuality, thoughts and pondering about his own sexuality, and questions that have been asked to the internet community at large. Actually, one of my favorite things about this site is the discussion that occurs with all of MayMay’s readers and commenters, turning the site into a forum of sorts at times. I can only hope MayMay gets back into the swing of updating the site, as I really enjoyed reading it. – EssinEm

Well, since I was reviewed so positively, I wanted to give something more than just a link back to Jane’s site. I decided I’d write a plugin that could make it just a little bit easier for blog authors using WordPress to display their JanesGuide icons. That plugin is called WP-JanesGuide and is available for free.

Thanks for the wonderful review, JanesGuide, and I hope you enjoy the plugin!

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