Calling UK sex-"poxes"...

New activist venture....

The Pleasure Salon is being created to build community, allowing sex-positive activists to cross-pollinate. We are inviting organisers, activists, pioneers and the movers and groovers of the BDSM, swinger, alternative gender, LGBT, sex-activist, nudist, sex-magic, polyamory, Pagan, radical faerie, tantra, dark odyssey, sex-blogger, porn, pervert and sex-worker communities. Through networking and learning about each other, The Pleasure Salon hopes to act as a sex-positive think tank and eventually create a sex-positive world. It is a place for the open exchange of ideas and sensual expression.

Pleasure Salons will take place on the second Wednesday in each month, starting in March 2008. They will be in Amora, the Erotic Museum 13 Coventry Street just next to Piccadilly Circus from 7pm to 9pm.

Each month will have a speaker - one of us who has something exciting to share, or an expert to advise us on how to lobby, influence the media, politicians, and society. The talk will just be for 20 minutes with ten minutes for questions and then a short news update. After that it will be networking. There is a bar and we will charge a nominal £2 to cover costs.

The Pleasure Salon is replacing the Sexual Freedom Conference and will hopefully continue to improve on it, both in enjoyment and effectiveness.

Suzanne Noble has attended the Pleasure Salons in New York and testifies that they are most empowering, and we start one in London with their blessing.

Suzanne, Tuppy, Cat

Well, I'm excited!

Having the Conversation

So a bunch of threads I've read in various places lately that have had some anti-BDSM overtones, there's one thing that I keep seeing people saying, which goes something like, "Clearly I don't know about this subject to actually argue about it [with actual kinky people]." Which sort of has me thinking, as one of the things that I've been having a lot of conversations about lately has been, more or less, "If I could just impart this knowledge, I wouldn't have to fight about this ..."

So it struck me that it might be useful to try to assemble a few things that kinky folks think would be useful to have compiled as 'before we fight, you should know' or something like that. Not getting the words quite right there, but I hope I'm making some sense.

The ones I've thought of while reading some of the discussions that are sort of general are:

* being a top/dominant/sadist does not intrinsically mean being interested in abuse, rape, violence, or non-consensual pain.
* being a bottom/submissive/masochist does not intrinsically mean being abused, a doormat, or having embraced a sense of personal worthlessness.
* top-dominant-sadist and bottom-submissive-masochist aren't tidy little categories into which kinky people can be divided; there exist people like dominant masochists or people who bottom without submitting, to pick two of a wide variety of potential combinations.
* people who can happily adopt both sides of a typically paired (as in top/bottom) role exist.
* some people get off on being deviant/transgressive/"kink on sin", yes, but many people -- certainly the overwhelming majority of the ones I know, though I would not presume to speculate about whether that's true in general -- get off on what they get off on without reference to whether or not it is something that offends the mainstream.
* an understanding of what it is to be kinky derived from public reports of play parties, photography of the Folsom Street Fair or a Fetish Flea, or news reports about acrimonious divorces with unsigned "slave contracts" involved is at best woefully incomplete, and at worst an offensively cartoonish caricature of the lives of kinky people.
* while some people tie their kink to gender in some fashion, a large number of people don't, and trying to force their behaviour to fit a gendered lens will produce gibberish.
* gay kinksters exist; kinky-people-of-color exist; disabled BDSMers exist; also Christians, feminists, members of various political parties; in short, kink coexists with a wide-ranging variety of other adjectives and affiliations.

A few more personal ones:

* if your response to my identifying myself as a submissive is to ask me how I can reconcile that sort of humiliation with a certain set of values, you either need to learn that your assumptions about what submission entails are flagrantly incorrect or get over your belief that providing good and competent service (and being well rewarded for it, at that) is intrinsically degrading.
* I feel treated more like an equal in my relationship with my liege than I did in the relationship with my ex whose egalitarianism precluded comfort with kink involving power.
* a little light bondage combined with a spooning snuggle is one of the most comforting things in the world to me (when I mentioned this to a friend the other day she commented that they sell weighted blankets for kids with sensory integration problems and nobody calls that indoctrination into bondage).
* my kinky sexuality is thoroughly integrated into my spiritual life, and no, it does not cause me problems with god.
* if your political agenda demands that my sexuality serve it, I am likely to back away slowly and consider you extremely creepy.
* I don't find the idea that when utopia happens people like me won't exist to be terribly utopian.

So. Anyone want to add to these lists?

YouTube clip about censorship in the Criminal Justice Bill

This two-minute video has been produced to spread the news about the censorship measures in the UK Criminal Justice Bill, and Backlash's opposition to them. The bill passed its second reading this week and is now at committee stage.

[Edit: YouTube have removed the clip]

The film takes a "film censorship debate" approach rather than a "BDSM rights" approach, as the former is likely to be more widely understood.

WARNING: The footage is violent and potentially distressing, as it shows the kind of material that will soon be illegal to own as stills, including controversial art films such as A Clockwork Orange.

Update on the UK 'extreme pornography' ban

Thanks to verte for the introduction. Here’s a brief-as-possible summary of the current status of the British government’s proposals to ban the possession of “extreme pornography”.

These proposals have been included as Part Six of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill 2007, which is due for its second reading in the House of Commons on 8 October. If the bill is passed as is, people will be at risk of entry on the Sex Offenders’ Register, and up to three years in jail, just for owning an “extreme image”.

As for what on earth an “extreme image” might be, the bill has become even vaguer on this subject since the consultation stage. It states:

‘An “extreme image” is an image of any of the following—
(a) an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life,
(b) an act which results in or appears to result (or be likely to result) in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals,
(c) an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse,
(d) a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal, where (in each case) any such act, person or animal depicted in the image is or appears to be real.’

Categories c and d are not relevant to consensual sexual activity in the SM community. However, a and b are likely to have extremely serious consequences. No distinction is made between images of real or staged sexual violence, and it appears not to have entered the heads of the drafters that there could be any distinction between sexual assault and consensual rough play.

A rigorous interpretation of the law could make pictures of everything from breathplay to fisting illegal. A really aggressive interpretation could make even images of vanilla sex without a condom illegal, as the participants could contract a life-threatening disease. How the law is interpreted will depend entirely on the investigating authorities.

Most ridiculously of all, it will become illegal to “extract an [extreme pornographic] image” from a “classified work”. This means that you can still buy James Bond: Casino Royale from WHSmiths, but if you take a still from the ball-busting scene you will be a violent pornographer!

Now the proposals are at bill stage, the government has also abandoned the emotive waffle about ‘protecting’ women and children that characterized the earlier stages of the process. Instead, in note 803 to the bill, they specifically refer to the footage in the Spanner case, describing it as ‘the type of activity covered by the offence’. Such material, it says, is ‘abhorrent to most people’.

The UK government, which has prided itself on its support of gay rights, is using one of the most notorious recent miscarriages of justice against gay people as a foundation stone for a new wave of sexual repression. They are doing so in the name of ‘protecting’ women, even though they have not bothered to produce a single concrete example of how women or anyone else will be served by a law that eradicates the distinction between actual sexual assault and photos of kinky fun.

To find out more about the Backlash campaign, visit www.backlash-uk.org.uk

Stealth Kink

Got thinking about this while writing my most recent comment on the "Superiority" thread a bit down.

One of the things I see a lot of in the fractal edge between the vanilla world and the kinked world is this notion that kink is clearly visible and obvious to others, that one can tell who is 'us' and and who is 'them' easily, by some set of tells. I see it in the discussions of Those Kind Of People in some spaces -- which have often led to me starting to put That Kind Of Content occasionally into my discussions there in response. In the discussions of things like dress codes -- formal or otherwise -- at certain sorts of events, even reasonably open-access things like the Fetish Flea or the Folsom Street Fair.

I've been in email correspondence with another submissive woman I met in the friends-of-friends way, and she commented something to the effect of, "I tend to think it's obvious in the way [my partner] and I interact". I flagged her as probably a sub because she came to dinner wearing a collar, and probably would have missed it otherwise -- she flagged me as something of the same in significant part because I played up some of the subtle interactions I have with my liege in order to try to communicate that back to her.

I negotiated a business transaction recently through Craigslist, and when I met the woman I had been corresponding with, I said, "Yup, rainbow Pride license plate frame and ... isn't that a leather pride flag?" Didn't notice a single bit of kinkiness aside from the sticker, in her or her partner.

I suspect that this feeds into a bunch of issues with prejudice around kink, because there is that invisibility -- and even if people are putting their leather pride stickers on their cars or doing other reasonably low-key communications, that doesn't necessarily break through the symbol-knowledge barrier. (With the woman I'm chatting in email with, I suspect that if I weren't BDSM-aware I'd have flagged the collar as being part of her, to nick her phrase, "punky biker chic" kind of look, with which it was entirely consistent.)

When I say I'm 24/7 or non-scene-delineated or whatever else, I sometimes get the impression from some folks that they can't wrap their heads around it because much of my life is so normal. I'm not wearing a collar and leather bangles and going on all fours and master-this and master-thatting all the time. I refer to my liege by his name in general conversation rather than some set of titles. I am reasonably competent, am not looking for a get-out-of-responsibility-free-card, and make my own decisions about the major matters of running my life. I don't wear fetish stuff all the time -- I mean, at the moment I'm wearing an old ink-stained school t-shirt for the math team, which while I'm sure it's someone's kink ....

And I've gotten the head-snapping, "Wait, what, you're a submissive?" response from people. One who had, say, the image of the snivelling whiner who thinks kink is about not having to think because Master does it. Or the person who's constantly blatantly expecting other people to engage with their dynamic. Or whatever else.

And I'm here, relatively stealthed, with all these little cues -- like the way I do small favors for my liege without him prefacing the requests with anything other than the expectation that I will do it, the way he touches my neck and shoulder when we're out together, the way I will occasionally sit on the floor when he's on the couch and rest my head on his leg and get petted. Stuff that I think is reasonably clear cueing, at least. And when I explicitly mentioned the d/s relationship to a friend -- the one who introduced me to the woman I'm corresponding with, actually -- she started visibly and said, "Oh really."

And so I'm sort of wondering how to deal with the stereotypes, in the whole pro-SM sort of way, the presenting things, because -- y'know, damn, it's not like I don't talk about kink. I wrote a trip report in my livejournal that included mentioning my liege dropping me into subspace in a bistro a couple days ago. And still people don't seem to notice, really. Which makes it hard to back up far enough to get a sense of what people understand about kink (I tend towards education as activism in all my weirdnesses), because there's this sense that the stuff that isn't obvious and fitting the prejudices just goes under the radar. (And this isn't just the sort of relationship d/s that I do that goes invisible -- witness Trinity's comments about being invisible as a female top as another example.)

It's an interesting problem for education and activism, really. How to express the breadth of what exists without necessarily needing people to be blatant about their private lives. How to shift the stereotypes so the quieter folks get recognised as existing at all. I know I'm at a loss.

Shout out...

Here is a newsletter from The Spanner Trust (who need a post of their own, if you don't know about the Spanner case). I think this outlines what's gone on in the UK quite nicely.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE BILL On 26th June, the UK Government finally published the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill 2007 (CJB). Sections 64-66 lay out plans to criminalise possession of "extreme pornography" - in terms even more sweeping than those of the original Home Office consultation document. Rather than actions, the proposed law is aimed specifically against pictures. Regardless of what is actually shown, what "appears to be" shown will determine the legality of an image. As well as necrophilia and bestiality, this includes acts which "threaten or appear to threaten a person's life" or "result in or appear to result (or be likely to result) in a serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitals".

Coupled with the stricture that images must be "pornographic" in order to qualify as illegal, this means that you can watch all the gruesome cop show murders you like, but if you like pornography of consensual fisting - which could cause serious injury if not done with due care - you risk a three-year jail sentence.

BBFC classification of your favourite porn may or may not help you. You are safe watching sexual violence on an 18-certificate DVD, for example the ball-busting scene in James Bond: Casino Royale. However, if "the image was extracted" - i.e. you have made a screen grab or a clip - then you could be guilty of possessing extreme pornography.

This is demonstrably ludicrous, and the Government actually admits in the notes on the CJB that it "constitutes an interference" with the European Convention of Human Rights. However, it is necessary, we are told, "for the protection of morals".

Part of this "protection of morals" is a blatant attempt to clamp down on the BDSM community. In spite of bland assurances during the consultation process that the proposals were not intended to target anyone in particular, the actual bill drops this pretence, and explicitly refers to the Spanner trial (R v. Brown and Others) as an example of activities that are illegal in themselves and will now become illegal to film or photograph.

What can be done at this stage? Well, the CJB has so far only had its first reading, which essentially means that MPs now know what's in it and can think it over before the second reading and a debate followed by a vote, which is expected by mid-July.

Although the CJB, which totals 245 pages of repressive measures on a whole raft of topics, is unlikely to be thrown out in its entirety, there is scope for the amendment or rejection of certain parts at this stage.

That makes this a particularly good time to write to your MP and express your views. Given the size of the bill, an MP who has received no letters opposing the "extreme pornography" sections is unlikely to even notice them. But an MP who has received one letter might start thinking about the issue; and an MP who has received 20 may well take the time to read the small print and realise just how unworkable this part of the legislation is.

If you need help finding your MP or constructing a letter then please visit the BACKLASH website: http://www.backlash-uk.org.uk - Backlash is leading the campaign against the proposed law with the full support of the Spanner Trust.

If you live in the UK please also consider signing an online petition against the law at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/extreme-images/

The Government's success with this measure so far relies on decent people seeing the words "extreme pornography" and simply thinking "well, with a name like that, of course it must be bad". Backlash and the Spanner Trust are questioning this assumption as loudly as we can; every voice helps.