Fellow feminists...

...I don't have much time to talk, but poll time: Is it just me, or are men in the vanilla world infinitely more creepy, sexist, and sketchy than the kinky ones? Ugh. I think I need to wash my eyeballs now.

Spam and Life

(No one comments here any more. Was it something I said?)

This isn't quite SM-related, but I'd rather put it here than my blog, so:

I keep getting rather ridiculous spam email. The same old same old they target at het men: use our product and enlarge your "manhood" and she'll never laugh at you again! Some of them began to get directly misogynistic, too: Love 'em and leave 'em. Stuff her mouth completely.

I bring this up because every once in a while I see stuff like this talked about in the radfemisphere, as an example of the sorts of creepy things most men do/want under patriarchy, the way they use women, etc. Other examples of this I often see cited are spam emails for porn, and ridiculous searches people use when they hit upon radfem blogs, like "teen rape animal" and the like.

And I'm thinking about this absolute inundation of "make yourself bigger, the ladies love a thick c0ck" emails I'm getting, and how... well... little I care.

And that I think is a major difference between the "radfem" and the "sexpos", or at least between the usual people in the two camps. For them, everything is a big threat, a revelation of how men really see things. For me, that's a somewhat creepy but generally amusing look at how weird people get when they're desperate for attention. We'll promise you T3N 1nch3s! We'll show you GOATS! We'll show you secret cams!

To me, it's all so obviously about the novelty. I mean, I'm sure that some people who put "incest daughter monkey asshole rape" into Google are actually interested in incest and monkeys. But I'm equally sure some of the people putting this into Google are interested to see just how weird of a thing you can easily find on the 'Net.

And I'm also willing to bet no small sum that the people who are actually habitually interested in the daughter monkey asshole rape aren't using Google. The websites (and in olden days, BBSes) where you can actually find this stuff are underground, and people know about them by word of mouth. There's this little organization called the FBI... and however ineffectual they may or may not be, they are in fact spending at least some of their time looking for child porn.

So... revelatory of a society that has a diseased attitude toward sex, based on women and girls being objects to degrade and violently dominate? Well... actually, maybe so. But not so clear a correlation as some think, imo.

Some comments to a post at Belle's

Belle, on the perennial TransWars:

Look: the truth is, if you're that wigged out about transpeople, or other transgressions against the -purity- of your single-gender space? Well, you're in plenty of company; what you -aren't- is "against the gender binary." To the contrary, you have a deeply vested interest in maintaining that binary. You have no intention of getting rid of Class Man/Class Woman; you've got too much invested in your identity as -radical revolutionary feminist- (isn't that what all this squawking is about? how you don't get no respect just because you know you have the One True Way of leading the world to salvation?) What're you gonna do if/when the "war" (as someone else just called it) is over? Finally enjoy all the forbidden fruits that can only be possible in a non-patriarchal society (x kinds of sex, visual erotica, play, fuck knows what else)? Take up canasta? Fuck no; if you were that sort of person, you'd be doing that -now-. This shit gives your life -meaning-; you have an -identity- now; take that away, and what do you have?

Me, over there, responding to "Fuck no; if you were that sort of person, you'd be doing that -now-. This shit gives your life -meaning-; you have an -identity- now; take that away, and what do you have?":

YES. EXACTLY. And this is exactly what happened when I was a radfem. I mean, I still did play, I still did defend it. But I got no joy out of it, because the identity I was clinging to said I couldn't. Or that yeah, sure I could be a sadomasochist if I also wanted to be a damaged bad example to the masses, but what FUN is that, when you accept that all you are is a victim parodying hir victimizers? I got very little joy out of it. Out of anything, really, until I decided to give myself permission to enjoy life and stopped thinking my enjoyment OMGGASPHARMEDWOMENWHOWEREN'TME.

Such a good post that I thought I should link it.

Who am I, what, and why? by resilientlight:

Why? I blame radical feminism and the sexual warnings in teenage books! No, really, bear with me. My fantasies are textbook "strict upbringing" ones, I know: by rights I should have been raised a Catholic. As it turned out, my parents are total atheists, so there was no guilt-ridden religious crap and they gave me a good initial grounding in sex education. (Although actually I don't remember any instructions about the social/emotional side of it, merely the physical. But would I have listened anyway?) After I was about 12, they figured I was learning by myself and didn't need them to spell everything out. (Real learning from books, that is, not playground wisdom aka complete bollocks.) They're left-wing types and believe in sexual freedom to an extent: abortion is fine, so is sex before/without marriage. But promiscuity is always shallow, porn is always exploitative, polyamory can never work in practice, and BDSM is probably dodgy but let's not ban it, let's just hope it goes away when everything is nice and equal and perfect.

My mother is an interesting case, actually: she was brought up Christian, rebelled against that and became mindlessly promiscuous for a while (hence "promiscuity is always shallow" - in her experience, yes!), then rebelled against THAT and became a 70s anti-porn-etc feminist. She's now hovering in the middle somewhere, her radical politics still there but toned down by time. Is hers the story of a generation? She would be against the expression of my fantasies because of her feminist ideas, and when I shared them I had to REALLY reconcile those things in my mind. It caused a huge philosophical struggle in my 15-year-old self, but I got over it by 18.

I blame (or thank) books for my kinky development. Through my pre-teens I learned almost all my "life skills" from books - I had nothing for my classmates but contempt, and if you'd known them you would see why. So I had no friends but a vibrant, scintillating inner life, much more fulfilling than the shallow dealings of the classroom. I was an avid reader from the age of about 4, and between 10 and 14 (the time sexuality starts to blossom) I read a lot of teenage fiction, and got a lot of sexual messages from there. And guess what the main associations with sex are, in teenage fiction? That's right, conflict and fear. The authors of teenage books, either out of conservatism or covering their own arses, seem to write this stuff on purpose to scare teenagers away from sex. There is hardly a single book on happy loving teenagers having good sex, and a million on vulnerable young girls getting out of their depth and being abused/molested/raped by manipulative older guys. So this was the picture of sex I got - destructive, invasive, about male power and female humiliation, your own body's betrayal of your higher self. Yes, I knew there was such a thing as sweet gentle loving sex, and that was the cultural ideal, the feminist ideal and my ideal too. But I knew it in name only, while "the other kind" was assailing me in such urgent detail from the pages of seemingly every book. And being a young teenager, my budding desires were determined to blossom in whatever context was provided for them. My fantasies seized on sex in the way it was presented to me, and I learned to enjoy it best like that. It's actually quite funny in a way that the books, though well-intentioned, triggered exactly the wrong response from me: portraying sex as destructive didn't turn me off sex, it turned me onto destructive sex. (Bit of an own goal, there.) But it wasn't all bad. I was top of the class in English, developed the vocabulary to explore my inner life, and quickly learned what drove me to the heights of pleasure and what didn't. Even today, I'm extremely verbal in bed, respond best to well-chosen words... and can't stand txt spk, even in texts!

The other thing that influenced me was my Mum's 1970s radfem books, which explored patriarchal sexuality a LOT for a concept they claimed to detest. I paraphrase: "Our culture portrays male sexuality as a mighty phallus ploughing masterfully through everything in its path. This particular text is about the strong male plunging headfirst into the at-first-unwilling woman, seducing her by force... and this writer believes in the powerful male principle cutting a swathe through yielding females... and this poem implicitly states that the man who takes a virgin in a sense owns her..." As the reader, you were supposed to inwardly boo at this, so my reaction was embarrassing. "Mmm," I'd be thinking, "that sounds good to me." Then I'd try to change it into "tut tut, how awful, we really must change that stereotype, mustn't we?". Then give up and get the lube out.

It's interesting to me that resilientlight accepts here the idea that our culture does strongly shape our desires, simply because my experience was so different. Personally, I can't relate to "desires budding in whatever context was provided." Part of the reason my own desires didn't bud much at all until my very late teens was that I got similar messages and found them distasteful. I only liked messages that suggested someone like me could be dominant, and those are out there but relatively few and far between. (Science fiction, I heart you madly.) It was only when I got old enough to stop caring as much what the culture seemed overwhelmingly to expect (and what even my own parents were reminding me was best) that I could actually allow myself to feel desire in a more serious way. Or to look at M/f themed stuff without feeling dread that someone would push me into it or feeling shame because I was different and it didn't appeal to me.

Latest News: Female Tops Are Still Unicorns

So when my sex life flags, I should do the one thing that renders me less interested in sex than in watching paint dry.

Who'd have thunk it?

(This post is a figment of your imagination. Dominant females, as we all know, don't exist, though people play them for pay. Sightings of actual dominant females in the Bermuda Triangle someplace are still being investigated, but should be regarded with the same skepticism as Nessie or El Chupacabras.

Some who listen closely while reading this message during a full moon have said they can hear the faint sound of rabid headdesking, but it's most likely just the wind.)