The Dalai Lama once said, “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” But today, as environmentalist and author Paul Hawken observed, “goods seem to have become more important, and are treated better, than people.” Faced with the existential threat of this mounting tension, our species will be forced to shoulder the challenge Jeremy Rifkin imagines we can accomplish: “extend our empathy to the entire human race as an extended family, and to our fellow creatures as part of our evolutionary family, and to the biosphere as our common community,” or perish.

Thus, the urgent question is: how do we do that? As it happens, today’s polyamory movement is uniquely situated at an ideological and technological intersection illuminating a possible answer. Polyamory’s key tenet—that a relationship involving more than two individuals is a good and valuable thing—is so powerful because it is so simple. To understand why, we can look to the Internet.

In his seminal work, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World, technology theorist Kevin Kelley wrote, “In the network economy, the more plentiful things become, the more valuable they become.” From a polyamorous perspective, one could say, “Love is not a scarce commodity,” or, even more generally, “the more, the merrier.”

A polyamory advocate’s core goal can be succinctly described as achieving equality in relationship choice. Like many polyamorous people, Angi, who “has one daughter, one husband, and one boyfriend,” sees compulsorily monogamous relationships, in which one person is “attached” to one and only one other person, as limiting. Instead, people may find more value when a person can be “attached” to more than one other person. In her own words, “we all deserve to live in a world where we are free to choose whatever relationship structure suits us the best, without being made to feel that we are some kind of freaks or degenerates.”

If you drew people as dots and the relationships between them as lines connecting the dots, the result would look remarkably similar to the topology of telecommunication networks like the Internet, wherein dots represent telephony devices (phones, fax machines, computers, etc.) and lines represent interconnections between them. However, a telecommunication network in which each device could only be connected to one other device—a compulsorily monogamous worldview—would not be very useful. Why buy a phone that can only call one other phone in the world?

This freedom to “connect” with whomever we choose, to exchange ideas with others regardless of geographic constraint, undeniably enriched our intellectual experiences. Is it so hard to imagine the same phenomenon holds true when we exchange bodily fluids or emotional adventures? Here’s how veteran web designer John Waters explained it:

In the industrial economy, scarcity established value. Natural resources such as oil, gold, and diamonds were scarce and therefore considered valuable. […] Paul Romer and other theorists introduced the “New Growth Theory”. In this model, the principle of scarcity is turned upside down.

The new theory essentially divides the world into two productive inputs: “things” and “ideas”. Only one person at a time can use things such as a hammer, a telephone, a lawnmower, or a car. On the other hand, ideas can be used by many people simultaneously, i.e., recipes, blueprints, formulas, methodologies, and software. They can be used to rearrange things. They can be copied, shared, and connected, thereby leading to more ideas. “Economic growth,” Romer says, “arises from the discovery of new recipes and the transformation of things from low to high value configurations.”

Such “transformation of things from low to high value configurations” is what the polyamory movement does with regard to relationships. The most obvious limitation with the often-monogamous notion of “true love” is that it creates a scarcity model, and free distribution is anathema to maintaining scarcity. Polyamorous people understand that “free love” is not just a hippie slogan, it is a way to create real-world emotional value.

Further, the “emotional value” derived from a polyamorous culture is not ambiguous. It can be accurately valuated, albeit not in any currency currently recognized. Instead of dollars and cents, the value it creates is of social capital, intimacy, degree of connectedness, and love. Its “currency” is none other than empathy itself; its payload isn’t digital data, but empathic experiences that cultivate shared joy. There’s even a word for this experience: compersion.

Polyamorists also developed discrete ways to “packetize” empathy and emotional communications. Conversational techniques such as “mirroring” (what Non-Violent Communication calls “reflecting”) in which a listener rephrases what they heard a speaker say, act as a kind of cyclic redundancy check, or an error-correction protocol, for emotional information transmission. It ensures that what one meant to say is what was heard, avoiding misunderstandings.

The introduction of new language—both terms and techniques for communication itself—is a profound change. In the words of asexuality activist David Jay, “By finding new ways to talk about relationships we can greatly increase our options for forming them.” In addition to the value offered by transforming the topology of relationships, there is value in having a diversity of relationship types; even healthy monogamous people have strong friendship, co-worker, familial, and other kinds of social networks that look similar to polyamorous people’s more intimate networks.

It is now our words, in the form of programming languages, that are driving the evolution of technology. Meanwhile, technologies like online social networks offer fertile soil where non-mainstream perspectives—and new languages—can take root. As Wired columnist Regina Lynn wrote, “Beyond the obvious benefits of online community, the language’s Internet-speed evolution continues to give polyamory a boost. When poly or poly-curious people stumble across the polyamorous lexicon, the discovery can help validate their worldview.” This marriage of polyamorous culture with the Internet thereby accelerates the distribution of the Dalai Lama’s prophylactic prescription for humanity.

In the early 19th century, American railways were a transportation infrastructure for commerce—a network of matter-moving devices. In the early 1990’s, the World Wide Web emerged as a general purpose infrastructure for communications—a network of idea-moving devices. Today, polyamorous and non-monogamous culture is a peer-to-peer infrastructure for the transmission of information about human relationships—a literal social network of compassion-moving devices.

As Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis observed, your structural position in a social network, and the topology of the network itself, influences many things in your life:

[I]f you imagine social networks as a kind of vast fabric of humanity—I’m connected to you and you to her, on out endlessly into the distance—this fabric is actually like an old-fashioned American quilt, and it has patches on it, happy and unhappy patches. And whether you become happy or not depends in part on whether you occupy a happy patch.

In other words, the success or failure of that quintessential American Dream, your “pursuit of happiness” is, at least in part, intertwined with others’ similar pursuits. Christakis continues:

If I were always violent towards you or gave you misinformation, or made you sad, or infected you with deadly germs, you would cut the ties to me, and the network would disintegrate. So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks. Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things, like love and kindness and happiness and altruism and ideas. I think, in fact, that if we realized how valuable social networks are, we’d spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them, because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness. And what I think the world needs now is more connections.

If our “civilization,” as our dictionaries insist, truly is “the most advanced stage of human social development and organization,” why then is humanity the only species in the world without full employment? Why are we so poorly trained in the principles of peaceful social development and organization? Accepting the polyamorous tenet, that goodness is inherent in social connectedness, is therefore fundamental to realizing our dictionaries’ aspirations.

After all, as Jeremy Rifkin said, “To empathize is to civilize. To civilize is to empathize.” If this is true, then cultivating the skill of empathy across the planet’s populace, as polyamorous culture actively endeavors to accomplish, is a prerequisite not merely for one’s own individual happiness, but also for the very survival of civilization—and our humanity.

As I’m wont to do, my article explores the intersection of gender, sexuality and technology. Since this topic is so broad, the strict word limit was a real challenge. But I like such intellectual challenges. The following is a reprint of my contribution, but don’t let the fact that you’re reading my piece here stop you from exploring SsexBbox’s new mini-blog/online magazine and its other intriguing contributions.

Gender is a text field, by maymay

In one hand, as developmental psychologist Gertrude Wyatt once remarked, the “symbolic transformation of bits of reality into language [is] part and parcel of the individual’s ego development.” If we can accept that, then finding our own words is more than merely good communication, it’s literally necessary for growing up human. There is no more universal human experience than that of describing one’s own identity.

In the other, as “wrongologist” Kathryn Shulz said, “the miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is. It’s that you can see the world as it isn’t.” This is no more profoundly expressed than through our species’ incredible use of technology, the force of which transforms the impossible into the possible. We have reached a point where arguably the most fundamental of God’s gifts to humankind—words—have come full circle.

It is now our words, in the form of programming languages, that are driving the evolution of technology. The corpus of this technological literature changes our physical reality, offering us everything from hormone therapies to space shuttles to online social networks. And as new technologies are developed, technology itself mimics its creator.

Except, that is, in at least one very crucial arena: the description of ourselves. To our technology, our genders are among our most baffling human properties. The binary coarseness with which our technology encodes this information should serve as a humbling reminder to anyone arrogantly proclaiming humanity’s superior intelligence; if your laptop’s screen can display millions of colors, why can your Facebook profile only display one of two options for gender?

Today’s standard for such things is defined in the International Organization for Standardization’s specification titled “Information technology — Codes for the representation of human sexes,” referred to as ISO 5218. This worldwide standard, most recently updated in July 2004, defines 4 mutually exclusive options: “male”, “female”, “not known”, and “not applicable”. It’s a simple scheme that takes a total of 2 computer bits to record.

That’s woefully inadequate—and we can do better. But how?

One early attempt called “Yay! Genderform” offers you 947 options using checkboxes, which allows you to combine each option with any other option for “a total of 1.1896×10285 or 1.1 quattruornovemgintillion possible combinations, more than there are elementary particles in the universe. If each option were a computer bit, it would take 119 bytes to encode a combination.” Though a good illustration of the problem space, staring at an interface of 947 possible boxes to check isn’t merely practically unusable, it fails to free us from the flawed paradigm’s constraints: we need to break out of boxes altogether.

A simple interface can be a gateway to endless possibilities. Take, for example, Google’s famously simple homepage; using just a single text field, Google gives you access to the entire searchable Internet. So, too, can a text field access the symbolic gender galaxy—or at least a coordinate within it.

The words we use to communicate are the tools with which we teach each other—and our software—about ourselves, who we are, who we like, and why. Designing sexist systems might sound brain-dead, but it’s actually how many people think of gender issues in their mind. They quite literally don’t see different humans as being equal; when two men marry, they need to figure out “which is the wife” and so they literally imbue the code they write, and the technology they build, with rigidly gendered, technically inaccurate world views.

Ultimately, it’s up to us to build a world where we can either limit or accept the possibilities of the people we interact with. Therefore, we ought remember Internet pioneer Jon Postel’s Law: “be liberal in what you accept.” Put another way: don’t limit us with boxes, because, as Eddie Izzard said, “there’s gonna be a lot more guys with makeup during this millennium!”

Formerly a professional web developer, maymay is now a social justice technologist whose work primarily intersects with issues of digital civil liberties and sexual freedom. He is the co-author of Foundation Website Creation and AdvancED CSS, the founder of the sexuality education conference series KinkForAll.org, and host of the KinkOnTap.com Internet radio talk show. His seminars on technology and sexuality have been featured at conferences from coast to coast, and he prefers couches to hotel rooms. Learn more at maybemaimed.com/cv.

As usual, please feel free to republish this article at your whim, so long as you don’t do it in any place that requires a financial commercial transaction to access (unless you get permission for that, first), and so long as you link back here. Thanks very much.

My talk was called “Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher,” and I subtitled it “How to make keeping it up easy and taking it down hard.” I wrote the longest talk I’ve ever given (~7,300 words) and, in my usual style, supplemented it with a slide deck totaling 220 rapid-fire visual aids. In the end, I felt like it went over pretty well, although I was exceptionally nervous.

I was nervous first and foremost because this talk had several far-reaching objectives. Among them were driving home the importance of fighting for freedom of information and free speech, explaining the way Internet censorship and sex-negativity support and often rely on one another, and exploring how social networking theory can help cure the current worldwide pandemic of sexual paranoia. Moreover, I also wanted to provide as much insight as possible into the months of thinking that have gone into my “FetLife Considered Harmful: The Risks of Sex Ghettoization” essay in an effort to clarify it, because much of the backlash against it (and me) coming from FetLife members and some sexuality community stalwarts betrays their profound ignorance of the issues at hand.

That’s a tall order. On top of all of that, however, I also had no idea who my audience was going to be, other than that they paid to see me speak at a conference focusing on polyamory. Were they going to be techies or luddites? Young digital natives or stereotypically technophobic moms and grandparents? All of the above? No matter how homogenous and receptive in-person attendees may have been, however, I also live streamed the talk and I knew I was going to publish it on my blog for the Internet to see.

Ultimately, I chose to de-jargonize the whole talk; I never use the word “database” and I only use the word “data” 5 times. I don’t think I mention anything more technologically complicated than “a proprietary file format,” and I use the ubiquitous example of a Photoshop PSD when I do. I tried to discuss the issue generically while still providing practical guidance because when talking to a large group, talking about too many specifics would likely benefit only several individuals, not the whole group.

In the end, this presentation is about the “practical theory” of anti-censorship techniques, and while I focus on technical (Internet) censorship most, “censorship” is defined loosely. I again drew heavily on FetLife as a case study but I mercifully had way longer for this talk (an hour and a half) than for my KinkForAll Providence 2 talk in which I first presented my concerns about that site (20 minutes). Even so, I still didn’t have time to go into as much nuance as I’d have liked. Complicating factors like Reed’s and Sarnoff’s laws were left out of my talk entirely and I feel like I just barely scratched the surface of what I did mention, such as applications for Metcalfe’s law.

Nevertheless, it just so happened that a conference about polyamory was the perfect place to give this talk.

I want to thank the staff of Atlanta Poly Weekend for accepting my proposal, for putting up with me when I insisted that they re-organize the layout of my session’s room, for giving me a wireless microphone since I had a sore throat so I didn’t have to strain my voice to give the speech, for making a special effort to video record my speech and my slides, and for generally treating me way nicer than I’m used to, even though the VIP treatment made me a bit uncomfortable. Most of all, though, I want to thank everyone who offered encouragement when they saw me banging away at my keyboard in the hotel hallways late at night actually working on finishing this thing.

And that’s another reason why I’m nervous. This presentation is a first draft!

So, without further ado, below is a low-fidelity video of my presentation recorded from the live stream. (The high-quality version has yet to make it to me.) Like all my similar work, this presentation is “open source” and Creative Commons licensed. Feel free to download it, use it yourself (including, since I can only be at one place at one time, literally re-presenting it wherever you wish and are able), or share it with anyone you think might find it valuable. If you do any of these things, I would greatly appreciate a link back to this page.

Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher by maymaym on Ustream

Download:

• Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher keynote presentation as a ZIP archive.
• Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher keynote presentation as a PDF document.
• Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher slides (and animations) as a QuickTime movie.
• Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher keynote presentation as a text transcript.

[Video of The Machine is Us/ing Us plays.]

What do bananas have to do with censorship? What do polyamorous people have in common with fax machines? And how can you help your ideas have sex? These are the three questions I’m going to answer in this seminar.

We live in an amazing moment in history. As I bet any sexually vocal person will tell you (if you don’t already know), the Internet has fundamentally transformed our ability to communicate with one another. For example, before the Internet, if you were a gay teenager in bum-fuck nowhere, you were the only gay person in the world. Now, though, after the Internet, if you’re a gay teenager in bum-fuck nowhere, you’re one of millions of gay teenagers communicating online.

This is big. This is not merely the evolution of telecommunication technologies. This is a revolution.

The second sexual revolution is about information

The Internet is such a big deal that it’s actually a revolution of all kinds—media, governance, technology itself. But it’s also a second sexual revolution, and this one—our generation’s sexual revolution—traces its roots through the first. This is where just a bit of history comes in handily.

On May 9th, 1960, the first oral contraceptive was made available to the general public; “the Pill” sparked the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Like all revolutions, no one could predict the outcome at the outset. It sparked chaos; the sexual revolution precipitated the “sex wars” in the 1980s.

Also in the 1960s—in 1962 to be exact—Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, affectionately known as “Lick,” (not kidding) first proposed a global network of computers. The project was initially adopted by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an R&D branch of the US military. Yes, the Internet was originally conceived of like a weapon.

As the slogan “Make Love, Not War” spread through public consciousness in the “free love” movement of the 60s, the Internet was being recognized as a tool of generic utility and in 1969 was launched as ARPANet. “Make love, not war” is, at least poetically, a physical parallel of Internet technology.

The specification for the ubiquitous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) was published in 1973—the same year as the Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion in America. In 1986, as the sex wars raged, the National Science Foundation funded NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps Internet backbone for expressly non-commercial, essentially academic purposes. The protocol for the World Wide Web, called the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), was developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, and, of course, eventually became the most widely used protocol on the public Internet.

In exactly the same way as Gutenberg’s printing press was recognized as a revolution, bringing with it 150 years of chaos, so too is the Internet. [Video: "Why do you think the world will be in chaos for 50 years?" clips play.] You may be asking yourselves, “Why is any of this important? So what if we are living in a time of media chaos?”

It’s important because disruption is the precursor to progress, and successful innovation harnesses chaos. Create chaos carefully, and you will be a force to be reckoned with. This seminar is about how to be a force to be reckoned with online.

Last month, on February 21, 2011, in an episode of Al Jazeera’s show “Empire” titled Social networks, social revolution host of Democracy Now! Amy Goodman asked:

In the United States, we don’t have State Media, but you have to ask, ‘In this country, if we had State Media, how would it be any different?’

While it is true that never before in human history have individuals like you and me been so empowered to create change using available telecommunication technologies, it is also true that never before in human history have all the technological pieces necessary for a totalitarian Police State existed simultaneously, as envisioned by Orwell—until now. In today’s age of postmodern warfare, information itself can be a weapon of mass destruction.

Information weapons come in two main forms: propaganda and censorship. Both can be considered cultural terrorism, each pointing in different directions. For us as sexual freedom advocates, propaganda includes fear-based messages spreading sexual paranoia or moral panic. Its target is the general populace. Censorship includes the firewalls, content filters, and bandwidth limits intended to target you—sex-positive publishers.

Lest you think I’m being hyperbolic, let’s look at some recent examples of the information landscape.

The censoring of sex

Perhaps the most obvious examples of Internet censorship can be found in China. But China also offers a particularly relevant case study for sex-positive publishers.

In 2003, a woman writing under the nom de plume of “Muzi Mei” became a notorious household name in mainland China after she started blogging about her sexual encounters with a number of men. She displayed a confidence that may seem familiar to many of you. In November of that year, she was featured in a New York Times article which reads, in part:

[…A]s China’s propaganda machine has promoted the nation’s new space hero or the latest pronouncements from Communist Party leaders, the Chinese public has seemed more interested in a 25-year-old sex columnist whose beat is her own bedroom. […] Mu Zimei is both reviled and admired, but she is not ignored. […] Her celebrity — which exploded when she posted an explicit online account of her tryst with a Chinese rock star — first seemed to baffle government censors but now has drawn a familiar response. Her forthcoming book was banned this week. She has quit her magazine columnist job and halted her blog, or online diary.

Yet at a time when ”Sex and the City” episodes are among the most popular DVD’s in China, the Mu Zimei phenomenon is another example of the government’s struggle to keep a grip on social change in China. Her writings have prompted a raging debate about sex and women on the Internet, where more people are writing blogs or arguing anonymously about a host of subjects in chat rooms and discussion pages.

”She does bring a huge impact on Chinese society,” said Zeng Fuhu, a top editor at Sohu.com.

[…]

[Ms. Mu] said she never realized her […] online diary would be so widely discovered, or that it would grow into a national controversy. But she defended her right to sleep with as many men as she pleased — and to write about it.

“If a man does this,” she said, “it’s no big deal. But as a woman doing so, I draw lots of criticism.”

[…]

Ms. Mu does not regard herself as peddling smut. She said her generation of Chinese grew up with little or no sex education. ”Some learned it from videos,” she said. ”Why not from words?”

Muzi Mei had opened pandora’s box. In the years that followed, a wave of celebrity sex bloggers, all young women, spread across China, each more audacious than the last. In 2004, a Chinese university student named Fu Rong Jie Jie posted softcore pictures of herself along with “lovelorn prose” and quickly became the country’s next phenomenon, calling herself “Sister Lotus.” She flat-out declared, “I will not be censored,” but by 2005 she had a cult following so large that Chinese censors ordered the country’s top blog host to move posts covering her to low-profile areas of the site and pulled a TV documentary about her from airing at all.

Meanwhile, another blogger, Liu Mang Yan, aka. “Lost Sparrow,” began podcasting lovemaking noises she recorded categorized by geographical regions of the country. That year, Pacific News Service reported:

In a culture where sexual attitudes are still repressive, the racy details shared by the women bloggers are thrusting them into the spotlight, despite China’s most recent crackdown on the Internet news media.

[…]

Though the Internet community for women is thriving, the Chinese government is stepping up its efforts to regulate online bloggers. China’s Ministry of Information Industry and the State Council on Sept. 24 released new regulations containing vague language banning sexually explicit content on the Web, which many analysts say are aimed at bloggers. Observers say the real goal of China’s Internet censorship is to prevent leadership and movement rising from the medium.

(Emphasis added.)

Sex-positive publishers, regardless of the labels they claim for themselves, have such a powerful effect on the inherently misogynistic, patriarchal, and sex-negative forces governing the world today that they—you, us—represent the collective human drive for self-determination. As Dr. Katrien Jacobs, Assistant Professor of Media and Communication studies at Hong Kong University writes in her book Netporn: DIY web culture and sexual politics:

[Reports] show that the PRC [People's Republic of China] party-state encourages the spread of the Internet while it believes that it can monitor and censor those aspects of activity that it sees as destabilizing, dangerous, and unhealthy. The PRC indirectly regulates the Internet by directly regulating intermediary actors/owners of cyber-cafés, ISPs [Internet Service Providers], Internet content providers (ICPs), and everyday citizens. For instance, the Guangdong public security department has agreed with local telecommunications companies to pay a reward of up to 2,500 yuan (US$309) to people who report any type of netporn traffic.

Dr. Jacobs also describes “the Chinese government’s provisions that were included in a draft of regulations in the year 2000 to govern telecommunications and the publication of news and electronic information on the Internet.” These regulations were a list of amazingly broad and vaguely defined “forbidden contents,” which were simply banned:

information that (1) Contradicts the principles defined in the constitution [of the PRC]; (2) Endangers national security, discloses state secrets, subverts the government, or destroys the unity of the country; (3) Damages the honor and the interests of the State; (4) Instigates ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination, or destroys the unity of [China's] nationalities; (5) Has negative effects on the state’s policy on religion or propagates evil cults or feudal superstition; (6) Disseminates rumors, disturbs social order, and undermines social stability; (7) Spreads lewdness, pornography, gambling, violence, murder; (8) offends or defames other people, infringes upon the rights and interests of other people; and (9) Other contents that are forbidden by law or administrative regulations.

Number 7 in particular, which lumps lewdness and porn together with murder, deserves being called out as what Dr. Marty Klein calls a “phony category”:

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

Also in 2005, in what was known as China’s “great Internet pornography trial,” the Chinese government sentenced 11 defendants, 5 of whom were university students, to prison for between three and twelve years. They were convicted as Internet pornographers under the censors’ regulations for administering a fee-based online BBS, 99bbs.com, whose users traded pornographic content. Dr. Jacobs describes the trial as an attempt of the government not to eradicate porn distribution but to undermine the very vitality of a new social network [because t]he values of this Chinese network were different from those of official mainstream society controlled by the PRC. It announced a sex/porn revolution in a twilight zone: It included the sharing of sexual ideas and communication by both women and men and gave its people access to pornography.

All of this censorship of sexuality is an erotophobic tightening of the social sphere. All of these regulations are fronts for an ideology that constrains women and sexual minorities. In China’s great Internet pornography trial, the lone female defendant, 29-year-old Zhao Yong, got the strictest sentence: twelve years. And just in case you needed any more convincing, just this week—THIS WEEK—32 Chinese women were reportedly arrested for writing and publishing gay erotica on the Internet.

China is not the only country with such repressive information policies.

Iran is equally repressive, of course, but so is Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Syria, and Vietnam, for example. Note, in particular, Tunisia and Egypt—both in the news recently due to their revolutions—were suffering equally pervasive Internet censorship, according to data from Reporters Without Borders. And Saudi Arabia, a key US ally in the Middle East, is just as bad. In fact, most countries that are connected to the Internet conduct some level of Internet censorship, including the United States. Interestingly, among First World American allies, Australia—Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s home country—is by far the worst.

Still think Internet censorship can’t happen here, in the Western so-called liberal democracies? In many of these countries, legislatures have been trying to ban content from the Internet for years under various guises: “combating copyright infringement,” “defending national security,” “eradicating child pornography.” These causes are routinely misused and abused to support a pro-censorship agenda, I say as someone who would support legitimate efforts to do all of those things.

And what’s censored most?

Blogs—especially sex blogs—like yours and mine. Personal blogs are more censored even than opposition political party websites, according to data compiled by the OpenNet Initiative.

A few years ago, I started keeping a list of corporations and public facilities that censored my blog and I encouraged my readers to report any blocking to me. I learned that I’m censored by the free Wi-Fi provider in both Long Beach, CA’s airport and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Austin, Texas; by Bolt Bus’s free Wi-Fi; by NASA’s Goddard facility in Greenbelt, Maryland; Vodafone UK censors my blog unless subscribers ask to opt-out of “Content Control”; and I’m censored by the public libraries in Austin, Texas, Sacramento, California, and Providence, Rhode Island (even on computers specifically reserved for use by adults).

Internet filtering at public libraries in America is actually mandated by a 2003 law known as the “Children’s Internet Protection Act” despite numerous reports, including the Youth Safety on a Living Internet report published in June 2010, saying Internet filtering is actually bad for kids and their education. Such misguided attempts at “protection” result in a sexuality information deficit that causes terrible emotional, and often even physical and legal, damage to the very youth they claim to be protecting.

This isn’t supposed to happen, right? The premise—and the promise—of the Internet was that you, an individual with something—anything—to say, can reach a global audience with the push of a button. But that simple activity presumes that on the Internet, all content is created equal. Or, as ever so famously phrased, “In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits.”

But if that were really true, non-controversial content would be pretty much the same as controversial content, perhaps of a political nature. Of course, we know that even in America, content is not all treated equally. The ACLU recently launched a campaign called Don’t Filter Me! because they received reports of LGBT websites being blocked in schools because they were LGBT education websites!

Censorship also happens in the form of service discrimination, not merely content blocking. For instance, after Wikileaks began releasing US diplomatic cables in December, 2010, it faced a series of extrajudicial attacks: Amazon kicked Wikileaks off its servers, Everydns.net withdrew its domain name, and PayPal froze WikiLeaks’ account. The amazing thing about this is that each and every one of these attacks has a sexual censorship precedent.

In other words, if you didn’t see this coming, you weren’t talking about sex loudly enough.

The folks who published the NYC Sex Blogger Calendar have had their PayPal account frozen and their funds seized not once, but twice, before they decided to ditch the service way back in 2008. Web celeb Violet Blue’s “sex-positive URL shortener,” vb.ly, had its domain name seized by the Libyan government in October, 2010. And just one month before Amazon cut off WikiLeaks, there was a big hoopla over Amazon’s initial defense of, then banning of a “Pedophile book” from their virtual shelves. Interestingly, Amazon initially said it wouldn’t pull the book because that would amount to censorship. Eventually, Amazon capitulated to public pressure and, of course, now the book is gone.

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

So here’s how we can frame the censorship versus free speech problem: On the Internet, even if your content may not be illegal, if you can’t find anyone to host it, link to it, or bill for it, it may as well be. In exactly the same way as Julian Assange is being called a “terrorist,” not a journalist, Galileo was being called a heretic, not a scientist. And in a fascistic world where such ludicrous stigma is treated as dogmatically-enforced fact, since I’m a “sex” blogger discussing sexuality a lot online, they call me a “pedophile.”

Of course, we’re none of those things. Nevertheless, we’ll all get called these things because, in the words of national security blogger Maximilian Forte, “The real ‘insurgency’ is the one being fought at home. To the state, every defiant citizen is a terrorist, in mind if not in practice.”

You may not have realized it until now, but because you as a sex-positive publisher publish material asserting different values from the mainstream society controlled by corporations and your government, websites like the Chinese 99bbs.com are your kindred spirits.

Circumvention Tactics for Information Guerrillas in the Culture War

Anti-censorship is called circumvention because it helps you dodge, or circumvent, the censors. Since there are many different publishing platforms, I’m not going to get into the technical nitty-gritty of which button to push on which screen. If you want to talk about that with me, I’d be happy to speak with you privately later.

Instead, I’m going to detail three best practices that, taken together, I hope will provide a framework for how to build anti-censorship techniques directly into the way you think about publishing itself. Each concept builds on the one beneath it, so you can think of any action you take online to be a cumulative result of these principles in action. They are:

1. Avoid single points of failure,
2. diversify your distribution network, and
3. liberate your data.

Let’s go through them one by one.

Avoid single points of failure

First, you need to be aware of single points of failure and do your best to avoid them.

A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system which, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. This is also known as the weakest link, and is the single most critical concept in this entire presentation. To explain this, let me tell you a short story about bananas.

Dangers of a banana (and sexuality) monoculture

When Americans think of bananas, they think of one and only one variety: the Cavendish. In the words of Chiquita, the globe’s largest banana producer, the Cavendish is “quite possibly the world’s perfect food.” But it also happens that all of the 100 billion Cavendish bananas eaten annually worldwide are genetically identical; every commercial Cavendish banana tree is grown from cuttings of the original tree. This genetic monoculture is the Cavendish banana’s single point of failure.

Since it lacks the genetic diversity key to a species’ health, any fungal or bacterial disease that infects one banana plantation can infect them all. That’s exactly what happened in the early 1900′s when similarly genetically identical crops of the Gros Michel variety of banana were devastated by a fungus called Panama disease. It ravaged plantations across the globe for decades.

According to a 2005 article at PopSci.com:

Growers adopted a frenzied strategy of shifting crops to unused land, maintaining the supply of [Gros Michel] bananas to the public but at great financial and environmental expense—the tactic destroyed millions of acres of rainforest. By 1960, the major importers were nearly bankrupt, and the future of the fruit was in jeopardy. […] U.S. banana executives were hesitant to recognize the crisis facing the Gros Michel. […] Once a little-known species, the Cavendish was eventually accepted as Big Mike’s replacement after billions of dollars in infrastructure changes were made to accommodate different growing and ripening needs. Its advantage was its resistance to Panama disease. But in 1992, a new strain of the fungus—one that can affect the Cavendish—was discovered in Asia. Since then, Panama disease Race 4 has wiped out plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and Taiwan, and it is now spreading through much of Southeast Asia.

Insistence on a banana monoculture is once again costing billions of dollars in efforts to save the Cavendish from extinction, just as was once spent—fruitlessly—on the Gros Michel. It seems to me that growing multiple varieties of bananas and importing all of them would be better for business and the environment. Yet American culture’s obsession with essentialism—on dichotomies, which are, briefly, a set of “good” things that are exclusive from an opposing set of “bad” things—discourages US banana execs from diversifying their product line, thereby keeping the American populace largely ignorant of banana varieties and contributing to environmental disaster.

The problem is not with any given consumer’s desire for a consistent—Cavendish-only—experience, but rather with the lack of anything other than a proscriptive experience as the only option, whereas others are, in fact, available.

That’s the exact same dynamic playing out with regards to sexuality information. You and I live in wild banana fields, where a variety of sexuality information is growing all around us. But most Americans are being allowed to access only one very specific kind of sexual information.

The moral of this story is that if you have only 1 of a crucial thing, that thing is a single point of failure and represents a vulnerability to you.

Recovering from SPOF vulnerability

There are two basic ways to deal with being vulnerable to single points of failure.

1. The obvious solution is to create redundancies for every part of your system; you make available as many duplicates as you can afford to maintain. (This is sometimes called “mirroring.”) This way, even if some parts of your system are taken offline or if some places featuring your content are blocked, the others will hopefully still be available.
2. The other strategy is to decentralize the system or content itself such that there is no single piece necessary for the other pieces to function; you eliminate single points of failure by making available as many overlapping pieces as you can. In this design, even if some parts of the system or of your content does get censored, enough of it remains available to maintain a cogent message.

A decentralization strategy is not better or worse than one using redundancy, and in fact a hybrid strategy is frequently most effective in most circumstances; both methods offer different advantages and disadvantages. Redundancy is often more expensive and time consuming to make available because everything has to be done multiple times (unless you automate the process), but it can offer greater integrity. On the other hand, decentralization is more often lightweight and versatile but can be far more complex to manage. Here, many small actions are taken by many participants in many places that may seem inconsequential or incomplete when viewed in isolation, but they weave enough of a web—so to speak—to become an agile, even graceful way to move through the world as a whole.

Some common examples of an Internet publisher’s single points of failures are:

• having only one copy of your data (no backups)
• having only one website or contracting with only one web hosting provider;
• registering only one domain name or registering domain names with only one domain registrar;
• hosting your websites in only one country, or state (or other area of legal jurisdiction);
• using only one publishing platform that you do not control (Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

Here’s a super simple example of recognizing a potential single point of failure and avoiding it in a tweet. Do you see it? Using two URL shortening services in one tweet means that if one of the services stops working, people who view this tweet will still be able to get a sense of the examples I’m citing as “GOP fiscal idiocy and moral irresponsibility” via the other shortlink(s).

Similarly, when I publish episodes of my sexuality netcast, Kink On Tap, I post a live, unedited version to Ustream.tv and then post another version to my own website, effectively making a mirror (a copy) of every episode. If KinkOnTap.com should go down, Ustream.tv still has every episode.

Here’s yet another example in which I published an exposé about some shady and unethical technology being used by Internet sex toy retailer EdenFantasys on two of my blogs on different domains. When a commenter expressed concern that I’d receive a cease-and-desist letter from EdenFantasys I suggested that they copy and cross-post my exposé to their own blog, which they did. As more and more copies began appearing online, it became obvious that a cease-and-desist letter would be pointless because the info had spread so far so quickly.

The takeaway here is that the Internet is a copy machine. Since digital copying is so inexpensive, combating Internet censorship is as simple as copying and distributing the censored thing, so censorship itself becomes increasingly expensive.

Diversify your distribution network

Second, you need to do your best to diversify your distribution networks. Herein are two key concepts that we’ve just learned. First, if you only have 1 distribution network, that’s a single point of failure. Secondly, and more importantly, diversity itself is a shorthand for discussing the SPOF response scale because diversity is anathema to censorship.

A distribution network is the infrastructure—the structural system—providing the means by which information flows. This could be a website like Twitter, verbal conversation with friends, or a conference like this one. All strong distribution networks are diverse. To understand why, we can look (conveniently enough) to sex and, specifically, polyamory.

Understanding distribution networks: Polyamory and the Internet, sitting in a tree

As I see it, a poly activists’ core goal can be succinctly described as achieving equality in relationship choice. That is, polyamorous people recognize that the structure of a compulsorily monogamous relationship, in which one individual is connected to only one other individual, is limiting. Instead, we argue, many people may find more value by changing the structure such that one individual can be connected to more than one other individual.

This has some remarkable parallels to the way telecommunication technologies (like the Internet) work. In essence, polyamory does for relationships what digital telecommunication technologies have done for ideas.

As technology theorist Kevin Kelley wrote in his seminal work, “In the network economy, the more plentiful things become, the more valuable they become.” Another way to say essentially the same thing, but from a polyamorous perspective, is “Love is not a scarce commodity,” or, even more generally, “the more, the merrier.” Here’s how veteran web designer John Waters explained it:

In the industrial economy, scarcity established value. Natural resources such as oil, gold, and diamonds were scarce and therefore considered valuable. […] Paul Romer and other theorists introduced the “New Growth Theory”. In this model, the principle of scarcity is turned upside down.

The new theory essentially divides the world into two productive inputs: “things” and “ideas”. Only one person at a time can use things such as a hammer, a telephone, a lawnmower, or a car. On the other hand, ideas can be used by many people simultaneously, i.e., recipes, blueprints, formulas, methodologies, and software. They can be used to rearrange things. They can be copied, shared, and connected, thereby leading to more ideas. “Economic growth,” Romer says, “arises from the discovery of new recipes and the transformation of things from low to high value configurations.”

So, this “transformation of things from low to high value configurations” is what the polyamory movement does with regards to relationships. The most obvious limitation with the often-monogamous notion of “true love” is that it creates a scarcity model, and free distribution is anathema to maintaining scarcity. Polyamorous people understand that “free love” is not just a hippie slogan, it is a way to create real-world emotional value.

Unsurprisingly, then, we can look at the evolution of telecommunications to learn about sex-positive movements. A good example is fax machines.

Contrary to popular belief, the facsimile machine was invented in 1843 by a man named Alexander Bain, built from the same things as the telegraph. It was not until 1906, however, that the machines started seeing significant use. Newspapers were the first early adopter because the machines allowed them to send photos across long distances. Next, weather services adopted the technology. Finally, 2 years before ARPANet was introduced, XEROX invented the modern “fax” machine in 1967. Today faxes are still ubiquitous, and they can interface directly with the Internet. There are, for instance, numerous services that translate faxes to emails and vice versa.

Like the Internet, the fax machine had a long incubation period. Moreover, it took millions of today’s dollars to invent the first one, and that machine was utterly useless. It wasn’t until the second one was built that the first one became useful. As more fax machines were built, each one became more valuable.

That’s Metcalfe’s Law: the usefulness of a network equals the square of the number of its users.

Metcalfe's law: the usefulness of a network equals the square of the number of its users.

On a graph, the “incubation period” looks like a long mostly-horizontal line, but then as more devices are added to the network, we see a continually steepening upwards incline. When people talk about the “network effect,” this is the shape they’re talking about. After a network reaches critical mass, as Kevin Kelley put it:

When you buy a fax machine, you are not merely buying a $200 box. Your $200 purchases the entire network of all other fax machines in the world and the connections among them—a value far greater than the cost of all the separate machines.

This works on multiple levels of scale. When we’re talking about it from the perspective of an individual, the “devices” of Metcalfe’s law are humans. Whenever you hear someone saying, “I joined FetLife because all my friends were on it,” what’s happening is that their personal social network—the people they interact with on a regular basis—has hit the critical mass crossover point.

When we’re talking about it from the perspective of a group, or community, then the “devices” are, themselves, communities. When organizers talk about “building coalitions,” what they’re doing is trying to pull their cause towards the critical mass crossover point. Metcalfe’s curve, as it’s known, is what makes large networks hard to resist—regardless of whether that network’s nodes are fax machines, people, or ideas.

When a network gets large enough, it becomes the de-facto infrastructure for the nodes it serves. Just as Facebook has become a de-facto communications substrate for large segments of the Internet-enabled populace, FetLife is fast becoming a de-facto substrate for many sexuality communities, often overshadowing, even replacing prior infrastructure.

Now, before I go any further, it’s important to mention that large networks like Facebook or FetLife are not inherently bad things. From the perspective of an individual node, this feels wonderfully connective. But if we scale up to the perspective of the group’s network itself, we see we’re suddenly alone; using a system that doesn’t offer interoperability, like FetLife for example, we’re unable to interact with other networks.

This is what in-group/out-group, us/them, you-versus-me, thinking looks like. This is how privilege hierarchies are created and recreated time and again. If ignorance is a privilege, then knowledge of this social networking concept is key to creating a socially just world.

Structurally speaking, when combined with the competitive, capitalistic, “every man for himself” ideology, the network effect encourages each large network to create incompatibilities with other networks in order to lock users into their service. In other words, this interplay pushes systems towards structural monoculture; it creates vendor lock-in. And regardless of whether it’s technological, cultural, or social, vendor lock in, as we’ve seen, is a single point of failure.

The only solution I see to this large-scale problem is to weave diversity into the very fabric our lives. That is, we need to systematicize diversity itself. And there’s no better place to start than sex.

Systematicizing sexual diversity

Now that we understand the systemics, improving the system is relatively easy, although it may be easier said than done. All we need to do as individuals is use multiple distribution networks, including as many services purporting to be subject matter-agnostic as possible, and prioritize services that offer interoperability with other networks. Similarly, as a community, we need to prioritize, build and use infrastructure that’s highly interoperable at every opportunity.

For instance, with regard to your own personal distribution network’s structure, I’m suggesting that you use FetLife and Facebook and your own WordPress blog, or whatever other services and platforms you have the resources to utilize. In other words, don’t put all your eggs one basket since this kind of diversification offers redundancy on the distribution network level itself.

Remember Kink On Tap? In addition to multiple copies of the content (my proverbial “eggs”), I was also using my own WordPress-powered blog and a social networking video site called Ustream (my proverbial “baskets”).

My other major project, a national series of sexuality education conferences called KinkForAll, is even more decentralized: it has a Google Group, a FetLife group, and a Facebook group (to name just a few), videos are posted on YouTube and Vimeo, live-blogged event notes are posted to personal blogs all over the ‘net, it has a Twitter account, and even an account on Identi.ca, an open-source Twitter-like clone. Moreover, since other KinkForAll participants independently create and share their own media from events, not even I am a single point of failure. Our own KinkForAll.org website is unusually spartan. To navigate, each upload is marked with a global “KinkForAll” tag as well as an event-specific tag, creating a decentralized yet well-organized multi-media cyber-library out of many small pieces, loosely joined.

In contrast, remember Violet Blue’s “sex-positive link shortener”? Since anything that declares itself sexuality-related becomes a target for censorship, building sexuality-specific infrastructure is a recipe for disaster. When vb.ly was taken offline by the Libyan government, all its short-links ceased to function. Violet had created a single point of failure and, worse, she had created one in the structure of the distribution network itself. That’s why I expressed critical skepticism when Violet launched her website in August, 2009; just as a road doesn’t care if it’s being driven on by a kinky person, Internet infrastructure should be content-neutral, too.

Beyond technicalities, though, publishing to (supposedly) content-neutral services challenges the hostile culture of sex-negative networks. In the last week of July, 2010, Facebook took down the community pages of Self Serve, a women-owned sexuality resource center, and also Violet Blue’s “Our Porn, Ourselves” consciousness-raising campaign page. While this cultural terrorism hurts us, not only will it hurt less the more decentralized our content is, but it also inspires conversation.

From a cultural rather than a technical networking perspective, when you speak up in support of, say, polyamory in a place where no one else is doing it, then as far as this new network is aware, you’re the first fax machine ever invented. It may take time, but when someone joins your monologue (even if they’re initially hostile), you’re suddenly having a dialogue—and that means they just became the second fax machine. Remember Muzi Mei, whose “writings have prompted a raging debate about sex and women on the Internet, where more people are writing blogs or arguing anonymously about a host of subjects in chat rooms and discussion pages.”

Finally, I’m suggesting that for both users of a network, like you and me, as well as creators of networks and networking tools, like Violet Blue and FetLife’s founder, John Baku, interoperability should be prioritized.

For example, I think the single best thing about FetLife is its “Events near me” page, but the single worst thing about it is that none of these events are findable from outside FetLife. Since there’s no way to access FetLife from outside FetLife, it’s like Vegas: what you say on FetLife stays on FetLife. This prevents individuals from, for example, importing event listings to their Google Calendar, something Facebook can do and that makes it more useful for a user.

FetLife is currently incompatible with any other network. In fact, nothing you post to FetLife can so much as be indexed by search engines like Google. This is also culturally dangerous because it nurtures an in-group/out-group mentality among FetLife users. But the “you’re either with us or against us” mindset offers no space either for allies or dissension, so the longer FetLife remains a technological monoculture, the more it becomes a social ghetto.

The online equivalent of dropping a bomb on a ghetto to eradicate a marginalized group of people is seizing or censoring a domain name. In this way, FetLife is to social networking what vb.ly was to link shortening: an easy target. And for a social network, as a network, FetLife isn’t very social. That’s why I think FetLife should work on creating public-facing options for at least three of its major components: journal entries, groups’s discussions, and events.

Not only would this interoperability be a boon for users, when we look at the big picture—at the level of networks themselves—this sort of federation is frequently nothing less than a matter of life or death for marginalized communities. Living in a hostile society, as we do, means we are many small and disparate networks. Even FetLife’s incredible ~775,000 users pales in comparison to Facebook’s ~500 million. Our smartest survival option is therefore to create as many connections as possible between groups: we must become a diverse network of interoperable networks.

As social network developer Evan Prodromou says:

The great thing about federated systems is that anyone can play […b]ut our current social web technologies don’t work like this at all. From the point of view of a typical social web site, if you don’t have an account on that site, you don’t exist. The only way for your friends on that site to interact with you is if they invite you to join the site. Despite the fact that there are hundreds of other social networking sites on the Web, almost every single one works as if there were zero other social networks on the Web.

That approach, especially for sexuality communities, is fundamentally flawed—isolationism is dangerous. To the extent that we are to have sexuality-focused social networks, or sex-positive branded infrastructure, we must federate. We must use tools that interoperate with other tools. And if we don’t demand that we get them from the people who control the large networks that we use, we’re burying our collective head in the sand.

Thankfully, it just so happens that federation, openness, and networking are all very sexual concepts.

Liberate your data

Lastly, you need to liberate your data. On the one hand, this simply means using services that don’t keep you and your content walled off from the rest of the world like a jealous lover, as we’ve just seen. In the words of DataPortability Project steering committee member Drummond Reed, this means that, You can read it, write it, or move it somewhere else—all under your control, using the tool, program, or service of your choice.

On the other hand, though, it means not acting like that jealous lover towards your own data in the first place. Since both the Internet and love function on the principle that abundance is more valuable than scarcity, loving your online content means setting it free. Have you ever heard someone say “don’t steal my idea”? This sentiment doesn’t make sense because ideas are free, and data—indeed, all technology—is simply a collection of ideas.

When computer networking professionals are “promiscuous,” they’re not being slutty—at least, not in the sexual sense. Instead, they’re configuring their network cards to let them see all the communication happening on a network. But transposing sex onto technology makes a lot of sense because technology evolves in exactly the same way humans do; using sexual reproduction.

As a sexual species, a human baby inherits the genes from both its parents’s lineages. But humans are not merely sexual creatures in a physical sense, we are sexual creatures in an intellectual sense, too. The way we share our genes to make new babies exactly mirrors the way we share our ideas to make new technology. Just as biological organisms evolve and they become more diverse, specialized, complex, and social, so too does technology evolve.

The easier you make it for your ideas to meet and, indeed, to mate with those of others, the more value you both will get from them. More to the point, however, the more your ideas “have sex” with other people’s ideas, the more diverse your idea distribution network will be.

Speed dating for ideas

When it comes to helping your ideas have cyber-sex, there are a few easy things you can do.

First, get out of the house. Have an idea? Talk about it online, on a blog, in a tweet, to a friend in email, anywhere that gets your idea out of your head and onto the Internet. In other words, publish, publish, publish.

Second, get socializing. When you publish, link liberally. Link to your own, prior content, and link back to the content that inspired yours. Speak URLs in audio recordings like podcasts so listeners can “follow” those, too. The more you link—the more connections you make—the more possibilities you offer others to interact with you.

Third, be yourself. Be sure to make your own source files available, if you can. In other words, open source your content. For instance, all artwork for KinkForAll, from icon designs to door signs, to promotional materials like print-ready flyers and postcards, is made available for free in their original file format. When possible, I convert proprietary formats to standardized ones that are more interoperable, such as turning simple PhotoShop images to SVG ones. I do the same thing with presentations like this one; browse my website and you can download all the assets that I used to make this presentation with one click.

And finally, be up-front, honest and open. Explicitly license your content permissively so that your content is legally attractive to others. You can use any of the Creative Commons licenses to keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit—hopefully with a link back to your site! I sourced most of the imagery you saw in this presentation in exactly this way. Again, KinkForAll goes even further, expressly putting all shared resources into the public domain.

None of us were ever meant to work, or live, or love completely alone. In the end, we need one another—and we need others who aren’t the same as we are. And when different people like your ideas, and then make copies of your work, they’re helping you stay one step ahead of the censors.

As I once heard said, “unprotected speech leads to brain babies,” and that means “epiphanies are orgasmic brain baby conception moments.” I hope I at least gave you a cerebrorgasm or two. :) Thanks for coming to my seminar.

So, with further ado in introductory headlines only, here are my three replies:

“Community Leaders” are often self-proclaimed, nothing more

@Evil_Geoff:

Fetlife a Monoculture? A MONOCULTURE? ? ? You have got to be kidding me. FetLife is the most diverse internet forum I have ever had the pleasure of participating in. I can’t think of any sexual identifications/orientations that I haven’t run across. If you can enlighten me on who is NOT represented here I’ll go find some and invite them to give it a look-see.

Herein are two distinct ideas you seem to be confusing with one another. This may be my fault; I tried to pack a lot of information into a very small timeframe. I felt I did a pretty good job, but I appreciate your commentary because I’ll take it as a roundabout kind of feedback pointing out ways I may be able to improve my incisiveness in the future.

Here’s what I think you seem to be confusing:

FetLife is a technological monoculture, and a social ghetto. If you take the time to examine my analogy to the San Francisco neighborhoods, you’ll see this more clearly. The "ghetto" of the Tenderloin is the most sociologically diverse area precisely because it is a ghetto; in it, various marginalized groups congregate. At the same time, the monoculture references the "not-ghetto" neighborhoods of the Castro, et. al., which are mainstreamed enough as to be homogenized thanks to their overculture "success" and subsequent institutional imperative.

The analogy to FetLife holds, too. Within FetLife, the Internet’s new "fetish ghetto," we have an enormous diversity of individuals, just as the Tenderloin contains an "intersectionally underprivileged populace" of all stripes (I mentioned immigrants from Vietnam, Blacks, and trans youth). Also like a real-world ghetto, in ghettoizing ourselves within this website, we have done two problematic things.

• First, we’ve recreated the same privilege hierarchies apparent in the overculture, as discussed by prior commenters; trans people remain a minority who are frequently bashed, rape apologism is frustratingly common in the groups discussing legal issues, and so forth. In other words, shit rolls downhill. FetLife groups essentially function as ghettos-within-a-ghetto, only they’re worse because they’re not actually technically capable of being "cordoned off" within the FetLife walled garden, and are thus even less protected from the hostile mainstream of the fetish community (yes, the mainstream fetish culture is hostile to its own fringes).
• Secondly, the entirety of the sexuality/fetish/what-have-you culture centralizes in a way that is technologically threatening. The technological equivalent of dropping a bomb on a ghetto in an attempt to eradicate a marginalized group of people is censoring (or seizing) a domain name. This is not unprecedented. See, for instance, Wikileaks, and many articles on TorrentFreak, to name just a few. What’s to stop the same from happening to FetLife? Frankly, not much, so why are we so mindlessly congregating in one place and making it easier for people who don’t like us (and I know you are aware of many such folks) to hurt us? I’m not saying FetLife shouldn’t be used at all, what I’m saying is that the way people are currently using it and the way it is structurally designed to encourage people to use it in the way they are is dangerous.

I think the rest of your comments, which seem similarly predicated on your incorrect understanding of the analogy I used, may make less sense to you if you re-examine the analogy itself. Except, perhaps, this one:

If you choose to regard FetLife as a ghetto, you go right ahead and do so. If it was ONLY an online community like SecondLife or IMVU, yeah, I might buy into your argument that FL is ghettoizing the alternative sexual communities.

Me? I choose to view FetLife as a bridge building opportunity for people of every kink. It offers the opportunity to connect and network with kinky people of all varieties at the local, regional, national and international level. This is a fabulous venue for REAL TIME GROUPS to cross connect, cross pollinate, coordinate and cooperate.

This is rather confusing to me because it seems you think SecondLife or IMVU are somehow only "online communities" whereas FetLife is not. But when I examine the use of these other services, I can only conclude you’re woefully uninformed about them.

See as just one example, NonProfitCommons.org, an organization that builds coalitions of real-world non-profit groups in SecondLife. They have virtual offices and regularly hold global meetings for executives, educators, activists, and community members for numerous non-profit groups who do occasionally meet in "the real world" as well. And on a technological level, SecondLife is safer than FetLife precisely because the SecondLife API offers a diverse technological ecosystem. See, for instance, OpenSim for an open-source, decentralized, scalable implementation of the same platform using the same APIs.

Therefore, your assertions that FetLife is somehow a better tool "for people of every kink" seems predicated on entirely emotional, rather than empirical, analysis of the world in which you live. I think such an approach is rather unproductive. You may have an emotional attachment to FetLife, which is understandable, but I think, like love, it is blinding you to certain dangers that I am pointing out.

I also disagree strongly with your belief in what you are calling "social Darwinism." However, I think that discussion is (related but) tangential to the points I made in my presentation, having much more to do with a systemic bias against openness in general in the sexuality subcultures, so I’ll leave that alone for now. (If you want to talk with me about that more, I think my post How Sex-Negative Lies Perpetuate a Fear-Based Culture may provide a good opening.)

Anyway, thanks for your feedback. I found it…surprisingly instructive. :)

Cheers,

-maymay

Many Rhode Island-based BDSM’ers are defensive fools

UPDATE: This particular thread within FetLife was deleted, making the following cross-post the only known record of this exchange. I think this very interplay of discussion-deletion actually showcases some of the issues I highlighted in my presentation.

Hmm. Well, this is going to be interesting. I’ll respond to many of you in a single response, since many of you seem to be saying similar things; that is, I seem to be getting quite a homogenous response in this group, in general. That’s cool.

Here goes:

@WrestlingFreak82:

I am an anthropologist, it’s what I do, it’s also what I hold a degree in.

This particular gentleman claims to be an expert on culture, or so his writings would make him out to think of himself as one. Aside from being an outspoken activist in the name of nonsense[…w]hat are his qualifications?

I don’t think I’ve ever claimed to be an "expert on culture," but I am flattered that my writings would make you think that I think I am one, because that seems to be quite a (backhanded) compliment about my writing! :)

As for qualifications, I’m unsure why you think someone needs qualifications to say what I said. If what I said is wrong, would my having a Ph.D. make it less wrong? If what I said is right, would my having a Ph.D. make me less right? Judging the validity of an argument based on the characteristics of the person who is making it seems like a rather non-academic way to approach a discussion; it seems fundamentally antithetical to the supposed purpose of academia, which (as I see it in its purest form) is a search for knowledge and greater understanding of the world.

Moreover, I would think that you, citing yourself as an anthropologist and academic, should know this already, so I’m also surprised that I have to point out such a basic thing to you. But maybe I should not be surprised; you tell me! :)

As for my qualifications, well, what kind are you after? I can offer either plenty or none, depending on what you are looking for:

• If you are interested in learning about my technical abilities, I would refer you to the two web development books that I authored (AdvancED CSS and Foundation Website Creation, and here’s a review for good measure) along with my résumé, among other things.
• If you are interested in learning about my career in academia, then I have none of which to speak, since I dropped out of middle school after I determined the educational institutions available to me were a suboptimal experience.
• If you are interested in learning about my achievements as an activist, then you could head on over to the "Things I’ve done" page on my blog, which offers an at-a-glance overview of what kind of things I’m involved in.

If you’re looking for other "credentials" or "qualifications," feel free to ask. Or you can just google me. I’m a pretty open book, so to speak. :)

@Kikea:

I think you’re confusing the concept of a ghetto with the concept of a safe space.

No, I’m not, but I can see how you would make that mistake. "Safe space" is, itself, rather subjective: safe for whom? There are numerous people I know who need to create multiple FetLife accounts precisely because one of their identities is not safe in some contexts, whereas others are. If this is what "safe space" looks like, I’m afraid it’s only safe for individuals who are already more privileged.

See, for example, the issues of trans-bashing, rape apologism, et. al., all right here on FetLife. :(

There’s a lot that’s different between the BDSM world and the LGBT one, and I loathe the contstant comparisons.

Like what? I think there is more similar than either side would like to give the other credit for. This may be an ideological difference, but I’m curious why you object to the "comparison" (which is hardly constant, in my experience, but perhaps yours is different).

@bawdybabe:

If you hate Fetlife.com so much and think it’s so bad, why are you even on here?

I don’t hate FetLife, I just think it is structurally harmful. I’m on here for precisely the reasons that I articulated in my presentation: network effect. Did you, uh, miss that part? It was kind of a central point. See also "signal boost".

Remember, complaining with out solution is simply whining.

Agreed. That’s why I’m presenting a workshop called "anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher" at the upcoming Atlanta Poly Weekend conference. The obvious corollary to my presentation is, "So what do we about this?" That’s the question I’m going to address this Saturday. I hope to provide a live video stream of that event and, if I can manage it, I invite you to tune in and follow along. :) And, thanks for your interest (if it’s genuine).

@saillefay

Did you do something wrong on this site and therefore get kicked off and that is why you are so pissed?

Well, since I am currently here and discussing this with you on FetLife, I think this question is hilarious. :) I’ll see if you can figure things out on your own. But let me know if you need help finding the correct answer.

@CelticKink1957:

What a bunch of pseudo-intellectual claptrap. One does not need to take twenty minutes to say "I hate social media. I am kinky. Felife is kinky social media, therefore I hate Fetlife."

I do not hate social media, I love it. I use it all the time. See, for example, my blog, my Tumblr, my other Tumblr-based erotic photo blog, my Twitter, my Facebook, and my podcast, to name just a few of my more sexuality-focused ones. Do you think it’s possible you may have misinterpreted my motivations? From any dispassionate observation, it’s obvious you’re barking up the wrong tree. But hey, enjoy! Woof woof! :)

@LordAtlaskajira

I’m a little stunned that the very site that you loathe so greatly is the very site that you posted your rant on. I’m sorry, were you expecting us to throw on our social media hating smoking jackets, sit with you, nod our heads, and say "Why yes, you are so wise, we shall abandon fetlife at once! Tally forth!"

So, like @bawdybabe, did you miss the part of my presentation where I discussed the network effect? How about the part where I discussed cross-posting material published elsewhere to FetLife? Because if you are stunned that I posted my article here as well, I think it’s possible, even likely, that you didn’t actually hear or didn’t choose to listen to those parts of the talk. That would obviously, in turn, make it unlikely you know what you’re talking about when you talk about what I said.

As for my expectations, no, I didn’t expect you to abandon FetLife, and (in case you are having trouble noticing) I have not abandoned it, either. Like I said in another thread:

I’m not saying FetLife shouldn’t be used at all, what I’m saying is that the way people are currently using it and the way it is structurally designed to encourage people to use it in the way they are is dangerous.

Those of you who are implying that I have, in fact, advocated the eradication of FetLife seem to be suffering from either/or thinking. This is precisely the (flawed) bias I am trying to alter, so I suppose it’s actually very unsurprising that FetLife’rs would be rife with such a bias. Hence, again, the point of my talk. So, in a way, thank you for showcasing a very salient reason why I gave it in the first place. :) That is, believe it or not, rather helpful.

@GeminiD:

26 y/o angst ridden college graduate? Come back after you live with repressed fetishes for over 20 years and tell me how FetLife is further ruining my life.

So, as mentioned above, I’m not a college graduate, and that fact is widely publicized. If you would have done even a simple google search or two about me, you would have known this. Clearly, you did not and thus I thank you for kind of making my point about the whole problem of the lack of information’s findability within FetLife, not to mention the way it seems to be further hampering the media literacy skills of individuals such as yourself. No, seriously, thanks. That was kind of an awesome demonstration. :)

Made plenty of friends, decent folks, and rid myself of a LOT of anxiety by being able to simply browse the boards targeted at my particular interests.

It’s really great to hear that you had a good experience on FetLife. As I said in a comment on my blog post:

I’m glad you have friends that introduced you to good experiences through FetLife. My goal is to make it more possible, systemically, for more people to have good experiences, like yours.

Currently, most people seem content letting such good experiences be a function of luck. I find that this tendency in these people exposes laziness and stupidity, not the compassion and strong work ethics they like to claim for themselves.

And to that point about exposing laziness and stupidity while the people exemplifying such behavior claim compassion for themselves, I will quote you, well, you:

If anything, this website has helped me become more tolerant and open-minded to diversity. I, not for one second, find myself in a sheltered ghetto.

I read everything, I watched the video clip. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just a child trying to pick a fight with a thesaurus.

We’re all happy here, go shit in your own back yard.

I’m unsure how anyone with half a mind could read your comment and conclude that you are either tolerant or more open-minded to diversity. Instead, I read your commentary and conclude that you have no idea what open-mindedness really means. Here is a short video about open-mindedness that may help you understand and hopefully internalize the concept more quickly. Good luck.

Cheers,

-maymay

Many academics are pompous dolts, but some ask really great questions

Thanks for everyone’s feedback so far. I probably should have stated in my initial post that I prefer feedback on the original post in my blog, but seeing as how this discussion is already rather involved, I’ll let that go for now.

Also, since a lot of you seem to be responding with similar or related points, I’ll address many of you in a single comment. Here goes:

@coolcatdaddy:

You come to the table with two points to make. First, you say that FetLife isn’t a "safe" space since anyone can log on with an email address and, eventually, misuse photos or other information there to harm individuals. Second, you state that it’s a kind of "walled ghetto" – since it’s closed, password protected and hidden from Google, it prevents information on important issues about the bdsm community from flowing in or out.

I don’t pretend to be any kind of scholar, but this would seem to be two ideas at cross purposes.

Well, I actually come to the table with more than two points, but I’ll address the two you cite, which are not actually at cross purposes. The reason they’re not and the reason you seem to think they are is because you’re treating the actor in both use cases as the same, when they are different. In the former case, the actor is a human. In the latter case, the actor is a machine. Not only are these different in a technical sense, they also represent different interests and different approaches to all the entangled issues (privacy, findability, and so on). Treating them as the same or even similar, as you’re doing, is a mistake.

the Internet just works this way for anyone with a special interests.

As a social justice technologist, my entire goal is to make the Internet "work better." Thus, your resignation that "the Internet just works this way…" along with the implicit corollary, "you should just let things stay the way they are," are tantamount to telling me "stop doing what you’re doing." That’s a perfectly fine thing to say, but it is nothing more complex than stop energy, which I reject out of hand for obvious reasons.

The same can be said of your other commentary:

"Safe", in this case, is about the freedom to interact with others. It’s not about "privacy", which is something that has be approached individually, with caution, with any site one becomes a member of on the web.

[…]

The Internet just mirrors "real" life and the way individuals socialize and maintain connections. We find like-minded individuals and join with them in ways that fits what we hope to gain from the interaction.

In case it’s not clear, I want to make spaces for sexuality discussion on the Internet as a whole better, and FetLife is a part of that, so I want to also make FetLife better. Whereas you seem to resign yourself to the limitations imposed by physical spaces, I think doing that is rather silly when given the tools (like the entire Internet) to free sexuality minorities from recreating the same limitations in cyber-space that constrain them in meat-space. I am, honestly, baffled that you would not think this is a cool objective but, y’know, to each their own.

@RickUmbaugh:

I think that this talk shows only one thing…that the Left-wing world of political correctness can and often is as much about fear, the idea that one can be found on FetLife and outed and authoritarian, the idea that if a place is not exactly like the person making the talk wants it to be it must be evil, as is the right wing of Social Conservatism.

Hmm. When did I say FetLife was "evil"? You seem to be imbuing my words with quite a number of your own. As I said in another thread:

I’m not saying FetLife shouldn’t be used at all, what I’m saying is that the way people are currently using it and the way it is structurally designed to encourage people to use it in the way they are is dangerous.

I also find it unfortunate that you reacted with such knee-jerk defensiveness as to completely obviate even the mere semblance of comprehension of my essay. Here, you seem not to have actually examined the analogy I used to open my talk:

@maymaym presents FL as a monoculture, but I have run into people on this site from the entire spectrum of the LGBTQ community. I have talked to bikers. bondage riggers, tops, bottoms, masters and mistresses, slaves and many other manifestations of the Kinky, sex postitive world, so I don’t know what you mean by a "Monoculture".

Either you’ve failed to understand my analogy, or you don’t actually understand to what monoculture I’m referring. Now, this may be my fault; I tried to pack a lot of information into a very small timeframe. I felt I did a pretty good job, but I ultimately appreciate your (facile) commentary because I’ll take it as a roundabout kind of feedback pointing out ways I may be able to improve my incisiveness in the future. As I explained in another thread where the same misunderstanding occurred:

FetLife is a technological monoculture, and a social ghetto. If you take the time to examine my analogy to the San Francisco neighborhoods, you’ll see this more clearly. The "ghetto" of the Tenderloin is the most sociologically diverse area precisely because it is a ghetto; in it, various marginalized groups congregate. At the same time, the monoculture references the "not-ghetto" neighborhoods of the Castro, et. al., which are mainstreamed enough as to be homogenized thanks to their overculture "success" and subsequent institutional imperative.

The analogy to FetLife holds, too. Within FetLife, the Internet’s new "fetish ghetto," we have an enormous diversity of individuals, just as the Tenderloin contains an "intersectionally underprivileged populace" of all stripes (I mentioned immigrants from Vietnam, Blacks, and trans youth).

That’s the meat of the matter, but I’ll encourage you to read the rest of the explanation in the other thread, too, since I think it may be of further help to you. Moreover, you also say:

FL is as inclusive as any site devoted to one world of sexuality. It is much more inclusive than any of the elitist, stuffy, humorless world of the politically correct and maymaym’s attempt to bring those values into FL or to destroy FL, which is probably impossible as it is too diverse a target, is not just anachronistic (see Gayle Rubin’s article Think Sex) but also destructive of the sex postive goals of the BDSM community.

It seems a common misunderstanding, especially among the simple-minded, that all is either black or white, good or bad, and your comment perfectly exemplifies this lazy thinking. As I said in yet another thread:

Those of you who are implying that I have, in fact, advocated the eradication of FetLife seem to be suffering from either/or thinking. This is precisely the (flawed) bias I am trying to alter, so I suppose it’s actually very unsurprising that FetLife’rs would be rife with such a bias. Hence, again, the point of my talk. So, in a way, thank you for showcasing a very salient reason why I gave it in the first place. :) That is, believe it or not, rather helpful.

Also, I think you would be wiser to approach your analysis of FetLife from a more dispassionate perspective. You say:

I have not been on FetLife for more than a year and I have found it open, accepting and as rigorous in its investigations of the Kinky Lifestyle as any place I have been, and I’ve been around since alt.sex.bondage.

As Bellaforte has said about some responses that I’m getting, like yours:

I think some folks are/will have a knee-jerk response to the title here, and respond with an instantly defensive tone. No one wants to think they’re part of something ‘harmful’.

Indeed, you may have an emotional attachment to FetLife, which is understandable, but I think, like love, it is blinding you to certain dangers that I am pointing out.

Finally, I feel it is important to dispense with even the pretense of pleasantries in responding to your comment. To that end, I will say that you appear to be quite a common and disgusting example of a self-identified male dominant who seems to be vastly more interested in pathetic pissing contests than constructive discussion. To wit:

Or maybe maymaym is simply a masochist who likes to be beat up intellectually.

Now, I enjoy getting physical bruises, if that’s what you’re getting at, and I enjoy both getting and giving intellectual ones in the mutual pursuit of a more just world. And speaking of intellectual "bruises," how do yours feel right about now?

@JohnWarren:

What I got was two mutually incomparable claims. First, FetLife isolates kink people’s writing and second it is dangerous because these writings can be searched from Google. [confused shake of head]

As mentioned earlier, they are not mutually incomparable, in part because the actors are different. As a corollary to that, and also as I pointed out in the talk, since the actors are different, the effects of this dialectic differ from the perspective of an individual as well as from the perspective of various groups ("fetish" culture as a whole, the further-marginalized fringes of the "fetish" culture, etc.). Perhaps this point needs to be further emphasized in the talk, as numerous people such as yourself seem to be completely missing the importance of this context. Thanks for helping me see that this is a piece of my talk that I could possibly have communicated more clearly if I said it in another way.

Additionally, you’ve also presented a great question:

The theory is presented that FetLife is somehow damaging to the kink community. What information could I present to refute this assertion.?

If anyone comes up with any information about this, please send it along to me. You can get my contact information on my website’s about page.

@Lachrymosa:

1) PROBLEMS WITH TONE: There are certain WAYS we have of doing things in sociology, or anthropology even. We can be critical of a subculture, organization, movement, etc., but there are norms surrounding how we do this. Breaking these norms generally results in your research being ignored, or worse yet, not considered research.

[…] what I saw on your page wasn’t academic research.

You’re absolutely correct. I should perhaps apologize for the brevity of my initial post. I am not an academic. In fact, I am a middle-school drop out.

While I am interested in a sociologist’s perspective, I did not mean to imply that my work should be taken as though it were created by a sociologist, or any other formal academic, for that matter. Again, apologies for not clarifying that before I posted. On this matter, I’ll leave it at that for now because all of your other points, all of which are valid, seem to represent a similar misunderstanding of who I am. :)

On that note, who I am is a person who asks questions and then says things in order to get other people to ask questions. In this sense, I feel I’ve been successful because you have some absolutely fantastic questions in your commentary. You say:

your research never gets off the op-ed page long enough to really answer these or similar relevant, interesting questions: why ISN’T the jig up? do Fetlife users FEEL walled in? Are there benefits to being "walled in" that offset the tradeoffs?

[…]

3)UNIT OF ANALYSIS: What are you studying here? You need to make this crystal clear. Are you studying the structure of the site itself and how it encourages/discourages particular communication tactics? Or, are you studying how people USE the site?

[…]

how can we know if Fetlife is a ghettoized monoculture when we don’t know how many people use it compared to other avenues for information?

Again, I think these are all fantastic questions, and all things that we could benefit from studying, and my hope in sparking this discussion is that an academic (perhaps you?) would be interested enough to ask such questions and then follow up with them! :D Thanks so much for raising the questions and please let me know if I can offer any assistance in your or your colleagues’ future research on the matter.

Insofar as empiricism is concerned, you’re absolutely right when you say the following:

Your argument is really predicated on accepting that virtually everyone in the fetish community is using this site and is starting to use it to the exclusion of other avenues. But, that in itself is an empirical question. The reason why I feel a little bit bad bringing this up is because I know what it’s like to do research on marginalized subcultures; head counts are unrealistic and impossible.

I gave a few examples of what essentially amounts to circumstantial evidence at best for my argument since, as you point out, formal academic research on marginalized subcultures is pretty difficult if not damn near impossible to do. Due to this reality, and due to my not being a researcher in the academic sense, I contributed what I can. In so doing, however, more of the same kind of evidence is piling up spectacularly quickly. For instance, while this thoughtful comment by kinkylittlegirl suffers from some incorrect assumptions about my motivations and intentions, the comment does seem to confirm my instincts regarding the exclusivity with which FetLife is "sucking us up like a big black hole":

Fetlife is where most people in the community gather these days, including my "meat life" friends all over the world, and is where local events are posted, some of which don’t even make it into the local community calendars any more.

This comment and this one are also similarly supportive, albeit still anecdotal.

Again, more research of the kind you are undoubtedly more experienced in doing than I am would be lovely. My ultimate goal is, bluntly, to be disruptive enough as to instigate a critical mass of interest in these long-overdue questions so we may have answers sooner rather than later.

Thanks again for your thoughts. I really enjoyed being mistaken for a sociologist for a day. :)

Cheers,

-maymay

Some fun with the FetLife TOS

UPDATE: Predictably, some people are discussing my “FetLife Considered Harmful” essay on FetLife itself, where I cross-posted it to my FetLife journal. While some of the points raised in that conversation are largely unsurprisingly stupid, there are also a few positive things. Notably, nell’s comment offers a reframing of my own words in her own, which I think is valuable. But GeminiD offered another thing worth pointing out:

@GeminiD:

Maymay has already been removed from other forums for TOS violations

This is news to me. Was it the Rhode Island one in which you started throwing personal jabs at me?

and has linked those forums to his Blog, without permission from the FetLife members linked.

I think you’re referring to this followup post. Interestingly, it’s now the only record of the response I offered to your personal attacks against me in the Rhode Island group that has since been deleted.

I think this is rather telling of exactly the interplay of issues I discussed in my post. Somehow, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ll do some mental acrobatics to avoid seeing it that way.

[…]

Cheers,
-maymay

It’s funny you’re quoting TOS at me, GeminiD. The sections you chose to quote are particularly interesting.

Take anything any other person has uploaded, posted, or emailed to you, on Fetlife and re-post such content anywhere outside of FetLife without the express written permission of the person who uploaded, posted or emailed you.

So, I didn’t cross-post your replies in the thread to my blog, merely my own. What you seem to be objecting to is that I used block quotations, but do note that what I cross-posted was not anything other than what I posted to the thread. I never cross-posted your posts, merely my own.

Your objection seems quite murky.

Upload, post, email, otherwise transmit, private conversations between two people in a public forum on FetLife without the consent of all people who are involved in private conversation.

This makes no sense. Are group discussion threads “private conversations between two people”? That seems ridiculous considering the threads included a much larger group of individuals, as my cross-post makes clear. Or, are group discussions “a public forum on FetLife”? You’re pointing to apples when I ate oranges.

I realize we may have different interpretations of the TOS, but that is precisely a symptom of one of the problems I highlight in my talk. Either you are ignorant of the TOS, or the TOS is arbitrary to the point of totalitarian uselessness.

So, again, you’re making my points for me. Please keep it up. You’re a gem. ;)

You violated the privacy of all the posters in that thread. You broke the rules of this community and got punished. That simple.

Also, I’m still not understanding what punishment you’re referring to.

Cheers,
-maymay

Suddenly, the publish button on my blog no longer represented mere readers, but a malevolent and tumultuous world filled with people willing and able to hurt me personally, professionally, and—at least in theory—physically. Rather than write and publish, I retreated to the safety of first, second, and third drafts, followed by an editorial review, and yet more drafts. Publication became an act of resistance, not merely an act of literary vulnerability.

My previous process was possible only because I had the people-power to support it: smart friends willing to hold me to my own standards of critical thinking and intellectual integrity. Conversation constituted the conceptual drafting of arguments, which were refined through additional private discourse until a short essay-like post—still in my own, often harshly, unapologetically and painfully embittered words—was produced. I was at times, and may sometimes still be, wrong-headed in my assertions, but I had enough safety in my relative obscurity to explore the theoretical terrain I had ventured into.

When the pain we were in forced my confidants and I to cease communicating regularly, I didn’t know what to do with myself. In some areas of my life, I still don’t. But I did figure out how to keep thinking, and how to keep writing:

1. Externalize my internal monologue by posting copiously to Twitter (via my own site, for data portability and anti-censorship purposes; more on that in March).
2. See what sticks, either because I keep talking about it or others pick up on something I’ve said.
3. Collect bits of related material in more postings or on a public scratchpad, such as my Tumblr blog. Sometimes this is all that was needed, as the collecting of material resulted in a post here on its own.
4. Write a long-form that connects the dots between these multiple pieces of disparate but related material, first in a draft that’s shared with a trusted few if I’m feeling scared, unsure, or lack confidence, then more publicly.

I like the thoroughness and academic rigor this process brings to my writing. But, I am lonely. This process does little to ease my emotional state, even while it hones my intellect. Direct human influence through conversation—the intellectual equivalent of touch—is replaced by the (sometimes literally) filtered thoughts squeezed through the cold, narrow distance of the Internet. And I miss being touched in all the ways that word implies.

I am trying to recapture some of the utility that spontaneity, that sharing first drafts, can bring. I did not spend much time analyzing this post for how I can be attacked for writing it, although I know I can be even as I acknowledge that this particular meta-reflection is less susceptible to attacks than other thoughts are, and so I am risking less hitting the publish button now than I may risk in the future. But I feel fragile and weak and, despite my purported prolificity, I often feel stressed like a bowed wooden plank under the weight of an immense load.

I would like to finally leave the safer confines of thoroughly well thought out posts. I wish I had a more reliable network of confidants with whom I was able to converse face-to-face frequently and consistently and who pushed the bounds of my thinking in doing so—but I don’t. And so I guess if there’s any point in writing this post at all, I’m writing it to ask you to touch my mind in the same way as you, dear reader, are letting me touch yours.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do it—this was not the post I sat down to write when I sat down some minutes ago to write. But what better post in which to ask for such a thing than a post for which I did not write a second draft?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow. (Here’s some background.)

Thanks. This made my night.

Questions for Filament Article on F/m

Alice Archer: [Can you provide s]ome biographical information – name, age, location, links to the relevant blogs you write[?]

Maymay: I’m maymay, a 26 year old guy currently living in San Francisco. I spent the majority of my life in New York City, however, and I spent a year living in Sydney, Australia. I wrote about the BDSM communities in all three of these cities, mostly at my personal blog at maybemaimed.com but also a little bit at my photo blog about male submissive imagery at MaleSubmissionArt.com.

AA: Do you think that F/m suffers from an image problem? If so, what, in your view, is causing this?

Well, yes, and the question raises a few distinct points that are important to understand. Although the F/m imagery we generally see presents only one kind of relationship between dominant women and submissive men, neither dominant women nor submissive men are monolithic groups. Moreover, although dominant women and submissive men are often lumped into the same group together, it’s also important to think about both groups individually.

The truth is that while stereotypical depictions of F/m relationships may be desirable for some people, they by no means reflect all the desires or the reality for all of us. So, to think of F/m imagery as a monolithic group is to actively reinforce the image problem itself. Let me explain.

Both the content and context of the imagery needs to be examined. Overwhelmingly, when people discuss female-dominant sexual imagery, they refer to the leather or latex clad dominatrix, wearing stilettos, snarling and wielding a whip. There are (broadly defined) four groupings here, since generally people who create F/m imagery also view some, if only the images they themselves create:

1. People who create F/m imagery and for whom it resonates accurately.
2. People who create F/m imagery and for whom it does not resonate.
3. People who view F/m imagery and for whom it resonates accurately.
4. People who view F/m imagery and for whom it does not resonate.

Far and away, the most well-represented groups are the ones who create the imagery, not the ones who only view it. Since the creation of sexually-related imagery is so thoroughly influenced by commercial interests, many of these people are either professional models, pro-dominants, or the like. Whether or not these people engage in F/m relationships as a function of their personal pursuit of happiness is, in the production context, irrelevant. People are often surprised to learn how many women appearing in dominant roles in imagery do not play a dominant role in their personal sexual relationships.

Herein lies the crux of the problem: in the over-arching culture as well as in the BDSM subculture (despite some BDSM’ers loud objections to this reality), representations of powerful women are extremely limited. Pictures of dominant women are so overbearingly policed, often focusing on wardrobe above all else, that for a long time the overwhelming majority of culturally acceptable representations of women in power were images of leather-clad dominatrices. And while I’m sure some narrow sliver of the populace thoroughly enjoys such stereotypes, it offers very little in the way of sexual gratification for most dominant women or submissive men.

As a result of this cultural influence, most BDSM communities became ghettos for the small group of people who enjoyed the single, narrow interpretation of F/m relationships that are available there, drawing more of the same into the community, and repeating the cycle of exclusion. Meanwhile, dominant women who, for instance, prefer to play tenderly and in hoodies and submissive men who, for instance, enjoy feeling cared for instead of being called names, are left out in the cold.

So the answer is yes, as most people understand it, F/m does have a gigantic image problem. And in fact, that problem is perpetuated, quite literally, by most F/m imagery itself. How crazy is that?

What lead you to start Male Submission Art?

I started Male Submission Art out of anger, bitterness, and sadness. For years, I had been viewing pornography, erotic images, and other iconography of the BDSM persuasion that did not resonate with me, that indeed pained me. You might ask why I continued to view imagery that I found so unfulfilling and you would be quite right to do so. The simple answer, however, is that it is my sexuality: I am a submissive man, and my personal pursuit of happiness involves expressing love and devotion to a dominant partner from a place of sexual submission.

While it may be reasonable to expect someone for whom most erotic imagery does not offer fulfillment to stop viewing it, it is downright cruel to expect that person to simply live unfulfilled. With few options for satisfying sexual expression, erotic art is a literal lifeline for many people, offering sexual fulfillment at least in fantasy for the things they can not, or feel they should not, actually have in reality. That describes me, except for the fact that I found most of the easily available imagery so distasteful for so many reasons that masturbatory sessions with the stuff sometimes ended in tears.

I felt ignored by so much of the imagery out there, but I optimistically believed I couldn’t be the only one who felt that way. I began to examine why, exactly, I felt so marginalized by most existing imagery and was eventually able to identify an aesthetic that I felt did a better job representing my desires. Male Submission Art was created as the place to curate images I liked, partly for my own sake, but also for the sake of the other men like me who I had to believe felt as I did.

What sort of reaction have you had to Male Submission Art?

The reaction to Male Submission Art has been amazing. Interestingly, it has attracted an incredibly vocal audience of women. I’ve received numerous correspondence from women who have said my work on the site changed their lives for the better. Many of these women tell me personal stories that corroborate my theories about the F/m “image problem.” For instance, Jenny wrote:

For me, years of porn and women’s magazines have left me expecting to be submissive, just because I’m female. And whilst yes, I could let someone take control of me, I enjoy taking that control myself because of the pleasure I can make others feel. […] Thank you for showing me who I am. Thank you for showing me it’s okay to be a strong, sexy woman who takes control (and not just as a one-off to turn a guy on).

While most of the people who wrote to me personally about the site were women, there were gay men and even straight men who also wrote to me. For example, Michael wrote:

As a hetero male sub, I’ve grown up looking at traditional Femdom images. Yes, I “get off” on it often, but there was always something missing: the tender, loving feelings I have and share with my Mistress. Best of all, I’ve found things [at Male Submission Art] that reflect our relationship (and other things) which I can send to her because I know she will enjoy them.

Possibly the most surprising response I’ve gotten from the site, however, is from submissive women. One woman named “Spark” wrote that she wasn’t like any of the other submissive women she knew:

I couldn’t call myself submissive because I couldn’t see how the way I felt and the way [other submissive women I knew] felt was at all the same. […] Then I came across your website, and started to see all these different images of submission. Something beautiful and valuable, a way to be strong and proud and yet not in control. Not something to be ashamed of, something you could really be proud of with good grounds. I guess I couldn’t admit what I wanted to myself until I saw submission with dignity and pride. And I couldn’t relate to it in images of female bodies.

These three are just samples of what must be hundreds. When I still had the energy to post on the site more often, Male Submission Art reached an estimated 17,000 visitors a month. To me, that’s 17,000 people a month who were either actively looking for or didn’t realize they were looking for imagery of male submission that resonated authentically with them.

In the end, we can’t be what we can’t see. And far too much of the mainstream culture doesn’t allow women to see men as opportunities for their own sexual gratification, and it doesn’t allow men to see themselves that way, either. And, while trite, the truth is that’s just not fair.

There have been other commentators questioning some of the prevalent images and assumptions about F/m. Do you think this is changing how people are expressing male submission/Female dominance ‘out there’?

Yes, I do. I’ve begun to see images featured on Male Submission Art crop up as people’s avatars and user profile pictures. It is especially encouraging when I see a beautiful image of a submissive man replacing a cliché image of a scowling dominant woman. Even some pro-dommes who previously featured images of themselves in their avatars have started using pictures of men they saw on the site. This is incredibly important, because it begins to inch towards more equitable representation in the media, both social media and, hopefully one day, mainstream media.

It also changes the way that people think of F/m relationships because so many women, like Jenny, are only offered two options for their sexuality by the overwhelming majority of media: submissive girl or scowling dominatrix. But this dichotomy is as old and as false as the virgin-whore dichotomy, and what’s clear is that perpetuating that false dichotomy does nothing to further the fulfillment of women like Jenny or men like me.

To quote from one of my favorite essays of all time, Kinky Sex for Social Justice:

While I greatly admire and at times practice female sexual dominance, in terms of sexual politics I think it is far less useful for female empowerment than it would appear to be, sort of in the way that the SAT answer choice that seems totally obvious and easy is usually wrong.

This is because intractably submissive men are actually often the biggest misogynists around: their worship of dominant women is the only way they can indulge deviant sexual desires while keeping their virgin/whore complexes intact. The dominant woman and the puritan virgin are in fact quite similar. They are both impenetrable fortresses of untouchable femininity; the woman-as-what-you-can’t-ever-have. The danger of actuality, of real possession, of the sex act and what follows in all its sticky complexities—which we never resolve because it’s no part of the stories of pursuit and courtship on which men and women alike are raised; stories that end with a fade-to-black on the way to the bedroom—is conveniently never reached, and the man can remain in a safe, comfortable state of unfulfilled torment.

Our culture has no idea what to do with happiness or with the getting of what one wants.

When I look at the way most other self-described submissive men behave, I am often infuriated knowing that I will—and do—pay a price for their disgustingly willful ignorance.

Some people say that F/m reinforces sexism by casting women being in control as something ‘absurd’. What would you say to that?

I’d say that thinking about control as intrinsically linked to gender is absurd. Most of the people who say such things hold contradictory views about sex and gender themselves without realizing it. For example, the idea of dominant women, women in control of a sexual situation, as an absurdity is undermined by the often regurgitated lunacy that women are gatekeepers of men’s sexuality, that women say either “yes” or “no” and thereby are either charged with or derided for controlling men’s sexual urges.

Anything else you’d like to say?

Curating imagery at Male Submission Art has taught me a lot, mostly because many of the images people suggest offer fascinating insights into their relationship with power, and especially how that relationship interrelates with their understanding of gender. I believe submissive men are one of the most under- and mis-represented groups of people, yet are simultaneously a group who could be extremely influential in advocating for gender equality, for the right to be who we want to be and do what we want to do regardless of one’s biological sex or gender. And yet many feminists, especially the anti-BDSM radical ones like Robin Morgan, are quick to discount our experiences out of hand. Morgan says:

Men who see themselves as relatedly masochistic, “femme,” feminine, etc., obviously are insulting the female (in person and in prinicple). If they grovel to a male master they are mimicking (for fun) an experience all women in patriarchy are in some way or other forced to endure in reality. If they cower before a female “dominatrix,” they are superficially reversing, and thereafter trivializing, real women’s real oppression.

I think views like Morgan’s are extremely unfortunate, because anti-BDSM feminists are supposedly fighting for the rights of women to express themselves as they want, and that includes dominant women. But by disavowing the experiences of submissive men, they simultaneously disavow the experience of people who like submissive men, which, if Male Submission Art is any indication, includes a hell of a lot of women. Such dismissive attitudes about the reality, value, and importance of equitable representations of diverse sexual desire reify the narrow, hegemonic gender roles they claim to want freedom from.

Finally, I want to say that like all aspects of sexuality, submission, submissiveness, and its counterparts are descriptive terms, not proscriptive standards. In breaking the mold of F/m imagery, Male Submission Art clearly shows that other people’s dogmatic interpretations of what is or is not submissive, what is or is not dominant, and especially what is or is not manly, have no power over one’s own sexual desires unless one lets them. And frankly, even and perhaps especially as a submissive man, I see no reason to let anyone else dictate my sexuality to me.

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

In light of this content being taking down, I’m publishing a copy of the profile I composed for her self-published column, below.

You Are The Beautiful Kind: maymay

Age

25

Website

• http://maybemaimed.com/
• http://MaleSubmissionArt.com/
• http://KinkForAll.org/
• http://KinkOnTap.com/
• http://ConversioVirium.org/author/maymay/
• http://InternetNonviolence.org/

I have others, too. Just google me for more details.

Orientation

I self-identify as “bisexual” when asked by most people. Among closer friends, I choose to self-identity as a “kinky queer.” I have a distaste for labels but appreciate the power inherent in language. It takes more compassion than most people I’ve met of either “sex-positive” or “sex-negative” persuasions to understand the incredible value that exists in diversity and difference. Like “sex,” both “kink” and “queer” are hotly nebulous terms that no one seems able to pin down. I feel that the freedom such vagueness provides is necessary for making self-empowered choices about one’s sexuality and, by association, one’s sexual orientation.

Relationship Status

I enjoy relating to anyone who shows themselves willing to relate to me as a whole person first, and a sexually submissive man second.

Favorite physical feature on yourself:

I like to think I have the eyes of a beholder, and that they are beautiful. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if you beheld your own eyes in this light, you’d think they were your most beautiful feature, too. :)

Tattoos/piercings:

I have a barbell piercing through each nipple. Getting them didn’t hurt as much as I thought they would.

As for tattoos, I tend not to like the thought of them on myself or others. I typically find unadorned skin one of the most beautiful things about the human body, although there have been a few people with tattoos who I’ve felt were gorgeous.

Are you a tits, ass, pussy, etc. man?

I find curvy female bodies particularly attractive; legs and asses are often the curviest part of female-assigned people. I also find the hips of male-assigned people sexy. Perhaps I just like being near hips, legs, and asses. :)

Are you cut or uncut?

I’m circumcised. No one bothered to ask me if I’d mind being cut before they cut me, and I find such lack of consideration regrettable. However, what’s done is done. I am always willing to forgive, but I strive to never–ever–forget.

Charity you support:

There are plenty, but here are some I think are especially worth promoting:

* The Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities
* The Woodhull Freedom Foundation
* The National Coalition of Sexual Freedom

What game did you like playing as a kid?

One of my favorite games was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It’s a classic Super Nintendo game about a young boy in a mystical land called Hyrule who possesses certain mental and physical abilities that he ultimately uses to save a kingdom from being overthrown by ideological extremists. Despite the heteronormative overtones, I found the mix of puzzle-solving and action/adventure a lot of fun. Also, Link is a hottie.

I also really enjoyed the various Sim games; SimCity, SimEarth, SimTower, and SimLife especially.

When was the last time you cried?

About a week and a half ago, I had a conversation with one of my heroes. Ze told me that while the work I was doing was “good for the world,” due to political pressure that had recently been focused on me, my principled stance could be “bad for me.” I cried because it was the first time someone I have incredible respect for told me that I wouldn’t live long enough to see my dream of a world without discrimination realized. I knew this already, of course, but hir words struck me in a time of particular vulnerability, and I simply broke down for a while.

We all need to cry sometimes. We need to cry and feel deflated once in a while so we remain grounded in reality. I’ve been manic and I have been depressed in my life, and I can say that my experience of depression is more firmly grounding than any mania, no matter how pleasurable. This is not to say that depression is “good,” merely that, with practice, the sadness and pain it elicits can be a rejuvenating force of life. Depression is like an emotional wildfire; it hurts and can be ruthlessly destructive, but it also has the potential to seed one’s soul with life-affirming soil and minerals.

I try hard not remain mired in sadness but when sadness is unavoidable I’ve found that it can be harnessed as fuel for my efforts to make Earth a better, more loving place for all its inhabitants.

What do you want to learn/add to what you already know?

I want to learn patience and calm. I’ve been described as “spirited,” “intense,” and “fiery,” as though I’m composed of elementary opposites (perhaps fire and water). I struggle with nothingness; doing “nothing” feels an imposition.

Special skill/talent, what are you really good at (non-sexual):

I’m an “information worker” in the classic sense, and I’ve been told I’m an exceptionally talented one. As an open source programmer (focusing on semantic web development) by profession, I deal with raw data of various kinds on a daily basis. Many of my beliefs are influenced by the ideals of the open source software movement, with transparency, accessibility, and accountability chief among them.

I live in the realm of ideas, concepts, and vision, but I also acknowledge that without means to translate these things to our shared reality, living there is useless. That’s why I write, whether in English or computer languages, and why I place so much emphasis on the importance of language. I’m also bilingual, speaking decent (but not quite fluent) Hebrew.

Also, I can solve a Rubik’s Cube in about a minute, juggle various things, and I crack whips for sport (and for play).

Special skill/talent, what are you really good at (sexual):

I think everyone is best at what they enjoy most. That’s why successfully communicating pleasure and enjoyment is part of what makes great sex great. One of the nicest compliments I received was from a partner who told me, “You taught me so much about my body.” But that compliment is misleading. I wasn’t the teacher, she just found herself more able to learn about her body when the sex she started having became pleasure-focused as opposed to goal-focused.

How old were you when you lost your virginity?

That depends on the “virginity” you’re asking about. If, as I presume you mean, you’re asking when the first time I had penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse with someone, I was 16. For the record, she spent a significant chunk of our relationship convincing me I was ready for sex before I felt comfortable doing it. After much discussion, she said, “A candle that burns brighter might not last as long, but I think the light is worth it.” The metaphor to our relationship seemed apt.

Sex, just like anything else in life, is only a “special” thing if you imbue it with specialness. Sex, like a bright candle, has no innate morality.

What are your masturbation habits? How often? Where? Props?

Masturbation is like an adventure game one can play with one’s own body and mind. :) If I spent as much time having sex or masturbating as my critics would have people believe, I wouldn’t actually have time to write and speak about the things they criticize. Make of that what you will.

What do you fantasize about? What’s your fetish? What turns you on?

I find dichotomies of power really fucking sexy. I have always loved, and still love, playing–but not being–powerless. (Photo credit: Male Submission Art)

The single biggest turn on anyone can tempt me with is intellectual collaboration. If I find value in your work, you suddenly become very attractive to me. The minds of motivated people who innovate in their fields are brilliantly sexy. I know this sounds corny, but it’s true. I’m an intellisexual, through-and-through.

What was one of the hottest moments of your life?

:) Those are memories best shared in person.

What would you do at an orgy?

Good question. I guess I’ll find out when I participate in an orgy for the first time.

You have one night to completely pleasure your lover. What do you do?

Pleasuring someone is an act deserving of thoughtful consideration and care. Although this is very hard for me to do, I think each and every time it is attempted, it must be approached with the childlike wonder that inexperience and uncertainty bring. I have never been able to pleasure a lover the same way twice, and I’ve found that I do better in bed when I stop trying to replicate past successes and simply relish the mutual enjoyment of the moment.

I find it shameful that we are so often indoctrinated with the fallacy that pleasure is some homogenizing force in society, that everyone does or should enjoy the same things in the same ways. The reality is that what one person may find pleasurable, another person may not. Treating different people identically and blinding oneself to the individual differences like body weight or genital sensitivity, or to group differences like race and socioeconomic class, is not a vision of heavenly equality but hellish discrimination.

Sex and pleasure is as diverse as food and nutrition. There is no single right way to enjoy food. Similarly, there is no single right way to enjoy sex.

As may have been clear from some of my answers, I bristled at the hetero-centrism in Kendra’s questions. For instance, questions like “Are you a tits, ass, pussy, etc. man?” presume a lack of male-male encounters. I found that (a little) off-putting.

What I didn’t know until after I submitted this profile was that the questions for female-assigned and male-assigned people are different. There are, in fact, two sets of questions in the YATBK column questionnaire (the counterpart to the “Are you a tits, ass, pussy, etc. man?” question seems to be “Beauty tip:”, reifying how the rules of flirting are sexist and wrong), and which set of questions you are prompted with depends on Kendra’s read of your gender. That’s more off-putting, but hey, it’s her website, and I appreciated the inclusion of a number of genderqueer profiles there.

“Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here.” —Marianne Williamson

The sex-negative strategy is composed of two major stages, each with its own primary tactic. First, scare; second, confuse. Both tactics are wielded against institutions (a political party, universities, medical associations, etc.) and individuals (activists, celebrities, researchers, journalists, etc.). In this series of posts, I examine these tactics closely, using real-world case studies and examples.

Although the actors and details of a particular situation are obviously unique, the overarching culture creates a cycle of abuse in which one can observe obvious patterns. Let’s begin by looking at a couple recent examples of the “scare” tactic.

Fear-inducing messages and the media

In the United Kingdom, reports of a surge of sexually active 11 year old girls have made headlines recently and are understandably concerning. However, as Dr. Petra Boynton elucidates, the headlines are inaccurate:

Rise in 11 year olds on the pill (Sunday Times); One thousand girls on Pill at 11: Huge rise in contraceptive prescription for pre-teens without parents knowing (Daily Mail); Huge rise in 11-year-olds on the pill (Telegraph).

The UK appears afflicted by ‘soaring’ numbers of sexually active girls, who lie to parents, enabled by GPs. Is it accurate? No.

[…]

This was picked up first by the Sunday Times then spread to other newspapers, websites and broadcast media. As we’ll see, journalists did not show due diligence in investigating the story.

While sensationalist journalism is hardly eye-opening, what is important to observe is how sex-negative activists employ mass media to implant their revisionist reality in an anxious populace. As Dr. Petra says, There is an ongoing crusade by elements of the media to be anti young people, particularly young girls, and against all forms of sex education. And, as we’ve already heard, scandalous headlines about teenage nymphos sound a lot more exciting than the real story. Dr. Petra correctly observes that the media sets these stories up as moral debates where there are distinct baddies (doctors, trampy teens, and anyone offering sex education) and goodies (Christian/Family groups, parents).

And the kicker, as Dr. Petra also notes, the frenzy can be traced back to the Christian Medical Association, on which most of the reporting relied, but did not critique. Let me repeat that, because it’s very important: journalists relied upon sources whom they did not question.

Once journalists have a story, however, experts are put in the difficult position of re-contextualizing a decontextualized report. In Dr. Petra’s words from BBC Radio, The problem with the story was it, I think, jumped to very extreme conclusions without explaining the wider data. (Quote begins at 13:07 in the recording.) Moreover, when experts try to introduce rationality, they get the Third Degree—they get the grilling the agenda-driven source should have gotten.

Through simple ignorance, over-eager sensationalizing, or intentional misreporting in the worst cases, journalists distributed fear-based messages that had parents scared about the well-being of their children, children unwittingly cast in the horrific role of untrustworthy miscreants, and sex-positive adults as (you guessed it) child exploiters. (Dr. Petra chronicles that most of the calls I took from journalists today were seeking to pitch me into battle—cast in the un-winnable role of the ‘pro sex bogeywoman’.) Only the bravest of sex-positive educators and activists would be willing to step into the fray at this point, so of course most remain quiet.

Again, while details across stories vary, the framework—a self-reinforcing catacomb of fear-based messaging and emotional appeals—remains consistent. Observe, for instance, the recent love affair anti-porn activist Dr. Gail Dines is having with the media.

Gail Dines and her colleagues insist that when men view porn, it leads them to child molestation, and when women view porn, it gets them gang-raped. However, the actual data tells a different story. So insidiously effective is this tactic of fomenting moral panic (and decontextualization, which I’ll detail in an upcoming post) that Gail Dines even headlines in left-wing women’s media.

Look under the hood and you can see Gail Dines’ campaign is promulgated by Christian groups and companies with explicit anti-gay histories, that her most visible sidekick is faith-based Pink Cross “charity” founder Shelley Lubben, or that among her most vocal supporters is former Bush-era Obscenity Task Force Prosecutor Patrick Trueman (whose own “Porn Harms” group crows with obvious delight at censorship of sex-positive discussions). Here too, the fear-inducing messages—and the thinly-veiled threat—is the same: “good girls don’t; men are predators.” It is a centuries-old reinforcement of gender stereotypes and The Patriarchy, of all things!

Moreover, some of these people are journalists themselves, collaborate directly with sex-negative activists or, as is the case with Julie Bindel, both. (For her part, Bindel has actually suggested that academics who disagree with her positions should be shot.)

This happens time and again, across all kinds of sexuality-related issues. Watch this pattern playing out right now about the misguided “end the demand” protests targeting Craigslist. The media only rarely mentions that the protests are organized by anti-prostitution activist Melissa Farley, a questionable source at best.

There are many people doing what they can to allay specific out-of-proportion fears, but I see far fewer people striking at the root issue: the fear-based landscape itself. Although organized fear of this magnitude may win at the ballot box, creating laws that cause real harm, it has no place in the better society we all claim to want.