No, seriously. Kill yourselves. You BDSM’ers are, by definition, rape apologists, and worse. KILL YOURSELVES.

The world would be a much better place if all of you people just dropped dead tomorrow. If you mention the word “Burning” to me, the next word out of your mouth better not be “Man,” or there will be prayers from me to whatever God you think exists that you kill yourself immediately. I mean it. KILL YOURSELVES. Get a gun, jump off a building, light yourselves on fire, overdose on drugs, pills. I don’t care how you do it. Just kill yourselves.

And likewise, you sex-positive scum don’t even try being subtle about the fact you’re scum ridden shitwads. Sex-positivity is such a sham and your “movement’s” mini-celebs are the open wounds on a gigantic seeping pile of hypocritical puss. Really, sex-positive people, I hope you die off, too, maybe right along with the burners, as there’s enough of an overlap between it’s basically the same thing.

Kill yourselves.

Let me make this perfectly. Fucking. Clear. If my tone bothers you, GOOD, now pretty please with a cherry top, fucking get out of my life. Block me, unsubscribe, whatever you want to do to just GTFO. I’ve managed to whittle my connections to you literal human filth down by about 30 people today alone. THAT’S NOT NEARLY ENOUGH. I know there are more of you pieces of shit still around here, so please either make yourselves known or just block and unsubscribe from this blog feed immediately upon seeing this post, if you’ve felt even the slightest bit personally offended or troubled by this post. Sincerely, I hate you.

I’m serious. If you are part of that pathetically ridiculous sex-positive clique, have any affiliation with a BDSM group or anything of the sort, do the world a favor and kill yourself. Or at least GTFO of my life. Sincerely, please die.

Me:

The reason there is so much force behind my pushing BDSM’ers and sex-positive cultists and Burners out of my life is because people who match that demographic are an overwhelming and integral part of the majority of my social connections. I am intentionally radically changing the makeup of my social sphere, mostly for personal and political reasons that involve the fact that people in these demographics are extremely dangerous to me (and to a huge swath of people who share numerous characteristics with me, but that’s a little out of scope for this comment), and that this usually takes a lot of time. I’m pushing REALLY hard on this and have been doing so for months and I’m STILL only just beginning to see the impact I’m hoping for. As [E] mentioned in the PAT-FB thread, it’s incredibly hard to isolate yourself from an abuser in your social circle. This is equally if not more true, I’m finding, for the case where the abuser is institutional, rather than individual. Which is kind of depressing. But not surprising.

A friend:

In regards to your last comment, and not the article, I really appreciate you pushing back against people and social circles that you feel are doing you harm, because, I feel like people connected to these spheres have also made me feel really uncomfortable, but I never understood why and often questioned my own intuition about it, because they so often represent themselves as being free loving, positive folks, who I *should* in theory feel comfortable around…but don’t. So thanks, may may. I feel like often the things you post about really allow me to accept my inner feelings, and even give further justification that I am not nuts or socially inept, but that these folks often say, do and represent ideas that actually cause me discomfort and not empowerment.

Me:

Thanks so much for saying that, [friend]. That comment is one of a very small and important handful that makes me feel meaningfully less psychically alone.

And on that note, someone I deeply respect told me “an ally is someone who knows the content of the oppressor’s lies.” Acknowledging for a moment that the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy is kind of a bullshit dichotomy (Because Binaries), it’s useful to use the dichotomy here to illustrate that, FWIW, I’m intimately familiar with the content of the sex-positive/BDSM’er/Burner Scene’s lies, because I once wholly believed them, and I experienced first-hand just how horrific they truly are.

A friend named E:

If it’s okay with you I’m going to borrow what you said about abusers that are institutional rather than individual. I haven’t heard it put quite that way before and it’s a useful construction, especially on the internet where individually unpleasant behaviour is so often downplayed on the basis that you’re supposed to treat it as an isolated incident, rather than as part of a pattern of behaviour tending to come from a certain sort of person.

A friend named T:

I am no expert in this field and what I am about to say may be way off topic, but based on what I have read from [maymay’s] website and his Facebook’s posts and conversations, I can’t help but draw a parallel between the BDSM and Sex Positive institutions and the Catholic Church. Priests in the Catholic Church have been molesting children for quite some time now, and instead of doing the right thing and aggressively going after these sex predators they choose to ignore it or try to cover it up. While the vast majority of people who identify themselves as Sex Positive or part of the BDSM scene mat be perfectly good people who would never dream of being sexually abusive, I still think they should have a responsibility to try to confront the problem of sexual abuse within the institutions that they belong, just as I think the vast majority of priests that do not molest children should be proactively confronting those priests that are engaging in that sick behavior. Part of being part of any system is to be responsible for the behaviors of those in that system, and that goes for any organization from governments to political parties to religions. To say that there are just a few bad apples making the BDSM or Sex Positive institutions look bad is to me a bit of a cop out. Whenever there is a serious systemic problem within an institution it ceases to be an individual issue and becomes a political issue, and with political issues come responsibilities for the leaders of the institution as well as everyone who is a member of that institution. I applaud [maymay] for standing up to any system that has become corrupted or unjust, and I hope more people will join his cause.

Me:

Go right ahead[, E]. You can just take those words, no need to “borrow” them. Nobody ever really has or even deserves ownership over ideas, ever, and any system that tells you otherwise (such as copyright or some ridiculous morality) is lying.

[T], you’re not wrong, although the issue you’re talking about is orthogonal to the topic in this thread. But basically, yeah, what you said. Although FWIW, I would personally amend that to say that most people in the BDSM Scene are actually horrible people for many more reasons than just the fact that they are silent about the problems in their communities. That’s only one of the MANY forms of complicity they, speaking generally, knowingly and intentionally engage in. Most important of these is the simple fact that supporting the BDSM culture de-facto supports rape culture because the entire BDSM culture *IS FOUNDED AND DEPENDS ON* rape culture. So if you identify with the BDSM Scene you are functionally identifying with rapists and I think the best thing you can do for society, short of working to destroy the BDSM Scene entirely, is get a gun and kill yourself.

A friend:

There’s something much more complex I want to say here. It’s about the practice of making oneself unappealing as a tactic for getting out of abusive intimacies.

I’m not exactly sure how to articulate it. I just wrote a whole long essay but I felt like I was just saying a lot of obvious things in it. I think the point I was trying to get to was this:

Humans are good at rationalization. And we’re good at hope. Sometimes so good that it’s bad for us.

You know how, sometimes, you’re in a relationship that you know is bad for you but you keep staying in that relationship for all the reasons that people stay in relationships that are bad for them? You still really love the person. The sex is great. You keep hoping they’ll change. You think maybe YOU can change. You’re afraid of being alone. The sex isn’t great but it seems like the sex potentially *could* be great if they just changed a little, and you just changed a little, and at least it’s better than nothing. You’re pissed that they got drunk and crashed your car. Again. You finally break up but they keep calling. They just want to come over. Just to talk. It’ll be different this time. And you’re lonely. And you haven’t dated in so long that you don’t even know how to start. And you miss sex. And you miss them. Hell, you miss just sitting on the couch watching Netflix together. It’s just a stupid car. Maybe you blew things out of proportion. Maybe this isn’t really the end. Maybe it’s just a test, and interlude in a much longer story in which you both live happily ever after. Remember that cute quirky smile they get and how you can tell just what they’re thinking? And you pick up the phone…

It’s possible to have the same kind of messy, push-pull, loving-harmful-heartbroken-hopeful, hard-to-keep-a-lock-on-what-really-matters relationship with an institution, or an idea, or a community, or an identity. You might KNOW it isn’t good for you to participate in and you might keep doing it anyway. Or longing to do it even though you no longer can.

It takes a several steps to finally get out of — and over — a relationship like this:

1. Get angry enough that you stop calling them.
2. Do whatever it takes to get them to stop calling you.
3. Start calling someone else.

Eventually, you do meet other people and get involved in new projects and causes and rebuild your life. And sometimes, particularly if the past relationship was abusive, that makes you angry all over again — because your new situation is so much better that, by comparison, it makes you realize just how much the old one sucked. But eventually, *eventually*, you get to move on. And some day, when their name pops up on someone else’s Facebook feed or you run into each other at an old friend’s wedding, you just don’t care. You have a twinge of awkward discomfort, maybe you get drunk and cry on a friend’s shoulder, and then you go back to your life.

. . .

Maymay’s point above about knowing the content of the oppressor’s lies, about having been intimately familiar with what it feels like to believe in these institutions, is salient. If you read even a little bit of May’s blog, it’s obvious: BDSM didn’t just run afoul of Maymay’s political sensibilities. BDSM broke Maymay’s heart. (And a couple of bad rebound relationships that turned out to be just more of the same didn’t help.)

So, if you feel confused about why Maymay has such an intense, emotional, aggressive reaction to other people who are intimately involved with BDSM etc., think about how you’d feel if you’d recently gone through a terrible breakup from a long-term relationship that you thought you were going to be in forever and some casual friend of yours rolled up and started talking about all the fun they were having dating your ex and how you should really get over it and be happy for them.

Now, imagine they’re not just talking about your ex, but about your *abusive* ex.

Now, imagine it’s not just some friend but, like, all of your friends.

. . .

I find, both in my relationships with people and with institutions, that my anger and sadness around getting my heart broken are rooted in disappointment. That I believed being in that relationship would mean having a certain kind of life and now that opportunity has been taken from me. The more I realize that the life I’d been promised isn’t something I would’ve wanted anyway, that staying in that relationship actually would’ve precluded other experiences that I’m much more excited about, the less angry I get. After all, as they say, the opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s apathy.

But you can never know what it’s like for someone else to lose something they love, what it feels like for them to let go of hope. Don’t fuck with other peoples’ grieving processes.

End rant.

. . .

That went waaaay off topic.

Original point: Making other people dislike you is sometimes a good way to put necessary distance between yourself and people/communities who you know are bad for you but who you have trouble staying away from for various reasons.