Rubber Bands and Kittens

I was just watching this YouTube vid, featuring an ex-"ex-gay" man. In it the man talks about his therapist having him snap a rubber band on his wrist each time he finds another man attractive.



I post it because it reminds me of my own experience as a teen, when I finally got up the guts to tell the therapist I was seeing that I had sadomasochistic fantasies.

"Imagine touching a boy," he said (I thought I was heterosexual at the time), "and then imagine petting the cat."

Ostensibly, it was to teach me to learn to enjoy touching people gently -- which I was never against doing, anyway.

I tried it all of once. Attempting to conjure up thoughts of my cat while sexually excited did nothing but creep me out.

I never brought up sadomasochism again to that therapist. I think I might have told him that I didn't think his method was helpful, but I may not even have done that. I just let the matter drop. I wanted health care -- I needed it, for a lot of other more pressing reasons. So I got the health care, and pretended my sexuality issues weren't there.

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!

Sadomasochism: The Incredible expanding word.

as if it weren't long enough, right?

It's a bit petty of me to quote this, but I want to for a not-petty reason.

From Heart's place, discussions she will not allow on her blog.

See here: http://womens space.wordp ress.com/2007/11/29/discu ssions-we-will-not-h ave-here/

Defenses of sadomasochism as liberating, empowering, or good, whether it occurs in the course of sexual intimacy of any kind, in “scenes”, in “play parties,” between fundamentalist men and their wives, in marriage, out of marriage, in relationships, in friendships, overt, covert, unapologetic, unrecognized, none of it is going to be defended here. Sadomasochistic relationships are at the heart of the systems, institutions, mechanisms, dynamics, social orders which have created the world as we know it, teetering on the brink of annihilation. Whether it is the sadomasochism inherent in war, imperialism, colonialism, conquest, fundamentalisms of all kinds, sexism, racism, classism, lesbophobia, transphobia, abuse of children disguised as “discipline,” abuse of animals, abuse of the planet, seas, mountains, skies, earth, or whether it is sadomasochism in intimate relationships between individuals, all of it, because it is about dominance and subordination, about some groups subjugating others, harms human beings, creatures, and the earth, it participates in the destruction of beneficent life on the earth, and so I oppose it. It will not be defended here. Defend it elsewhere.

What I really want to point out, to people who have not seen this yet, is the way the term "sadomasochism" gets expanded here. Inflated like a balloon until it has no precise meaning. Watch:

whether it occurs in the course of sexual intimacy of any kind, in “scenes”, in “play parties,”

okay, that's about the SM scene, a particular subculture, and also some people outside the subculture who fuck a certain way. "Sadomasochism" here means something like "people who consensually play with power for sexual gratification." Which is what I'd say it usually means, though I'd add "or pain"; I don't think all consensual sexual SM is about power, and some may arguably not even involve it.

between fundamentalist men and their wives, in marriage, out of marriage, in relationships, in friendships, overt, covert, unapologetic, unrecognized

And here, well, wrt "fundamentalist men": yes, there's traditionalist Christian D/s if you want to look for it. And, expanding further, an argument could be made that a particularly consensual, aware, chosen version of religious submission *could* be similar to the D/s sadomasochists do.

But "in friendships" is where she begins to lose me, and she doesn't stop there. Yes, there are power dynamics between friends. They can be harmful. But why are they "sadomasochistic", if so? In most cases, they will not be sexual, though they may have undercurrents of sexual intimacy and attraction. Are they consensual? Do they really involve submission? How are we defining domination and submission when talking about friends?

What leads people to conclusions like this, as near as I can figure, is a notion of "sadomasochism" that divorces it from sex or even from chosen dynamics of nonsexual service, and takes it to stand in for any and all relations of power-over:

Sadomasochistic relationships are at the heart of the systems, institutions, mechanisms, dynamics, social orders which have created the world as we know it, teetering on the brink of annihilation.

Which of course means you find it anywhere and everywhere, and there's no relevant difference between the play party and the invasion of Iraq:

Whether it is the sadomasochism inherent in war, imperialism, colonialism, conquest, fundamentalisms of all kinds, sexism, racism, classism, lesbophobia, transphobia, abuse of children disguised as “discipline,” abuse of animals, abuse of the planet, seas, mountains, skies, earth, or whether it is sadomasochism in intimate relationships between individuals, all of it, because it is about dominance and subordination, about some groups subjugating others, harms human beings, creatures, and the earth, it participates in the destruction of beneficent life on the earth

This is just sloppy. Which is what gets me so much when I look at things like this (and you can see it other places too... just go read some Daly, for example) isn't even the opposition to consensual sexual sadomasochism (though duh, I don't like that) but the sheer papering over of issues.

Even if the play party *is* objectionable, because power-over *is* dangerous and not to be fucked (heh) with:

where is the difference between the play party and global warming? Surely, even if these are related (and I don't think it's completely *unarguable* that they are, *if* we assume all power-over to be pernicious), the harms each does are not the same.

Shouldn't it be part of our analysis, a strength of our analysis, that we can say

"these are the harms of consensual SM"
"these are the harms of religiously-motivated female submission"
"these are the harms of war"
"these are the harms of rampant consumption of resources"
"these are the harms of child abuse"

and have each of those be A DIFFERENT THING?

Presumably, "sadomasochism" is a word, here, for whatever thing they have in common, whatever holds them together.

Which has to do with power.

But we can't really say how. It's like Socrates asking "What's virtue What's common to any and all virtues that makes them what they are?" No one can answer him, and he doesn't know himself.

"What's pernicious power-over? What's common to it in every instance, when the instances look so different?"

No one can answer, and we don't know ourselves.

Which is why we need the ten-dollar word that means fucking to paper over it.

"Sex Pox"

x-POXted from my LJ:

On the term "sex pox", coined by some anti-porn radical feminists as a cutesy put-down version of "sex positive":

So - "sexpox".

I think the term originated a couple of months back, as a way to convey contempt for people who espouse a non-anti-porn, non-anti-sexwork, non-anti-BDSM, "sex-positive" point of view.

And then it was bandied about by people who espouse a "sex-positive" point of view, as a sort of snide self-identification, as a way to convey contempt for people who used the term to convey contempt for "sex-positive" people.

Now that I think about it, despite the fact that it's catchy and easy to remember and evocative and really, only five or six people use the term in its pejorative on a regular so maybe it's not such a big deal - I gotta say, I'm agin' it.

cuz, y'all, what about AIDS?

whatever side of the porn/sexwork/bdsm fence you sit on, what about AIDS, y'all?

I'm not HIV+, nor am I an AIDS activist. But I know people who work long and hard to purge the idea from the human consciousness that there is some consensual sexual behavior that deserves PUNISHMENT. Not just any punishment, but The Biggest, Baddest, Most Punishing Punishment - long, slow, conspicuously Capital Punishment in the form of a wasting disease, with clearly visible physical benchmarks of its progress as it slowly kills its victims.

so, when I see the word "sexpox", I don't think of cute hawtt titjobbed bisexee suckfuckers who giggle and simper on their spindly heels and tilt their empty heads and smile while cooing "ooh! I'm so empowerful! aren't I, Nigel?"

(and even if I did get that mental picture, it wouldn't match any of the individuals I know who identify as "sex-positive." the gulf of understanding here is unbridgeable, apparently, when it comes to that.)

when I see the word "sexpox", I think of a fatal disease that happens to people who fuck the wrong way, and need to be punished before they can die as a consequence for their behavior.

Totally bang-on, AP.

And pretty chilling.

Personally, I don't know if the person who coined this *was* thinking of HIV or not. I personally thought of syphilis. And while "syphilitic" isn't the greatest thing to call someone, it doesn't kill like it did back when *it* was the scourge. (At least until the "Bah, I scoff at your silly antibiotics!" version has its fun with the silly little humans....)

And I'm a bit leery of getting too Freudian, usually.

But I really do wonder: if you come up with a term like this, you have to know that you're calling people diseased. From sex. And any way you slice it, that's creepy.

That's not just calling people bad, wrong, misguided in a hellaciously frustrating way. That's saying people ought to be suffering for their views. That we're destined for illness, as AP says, as a punishment for our refusals to fit a particular mold of female sexuality.

I see a very strong loathing of bodies, in general, in the insult of choice being "sex pox.:" There's a strong body-disgust there. It's not just about the realm of the mind, when you call people poxy. It's like something out of the Old Testament: misstep and you get LOATHSOME BOILS as punishment for your sexual sin.

Or at least, that's the mild version. AIDS is our big sex pox, as AP points out -- and AIDS is worse than an angry deity giving you a few boils.

I'd know; as I've mentioned before, I'm watching someone waste away of it. And it's not pretty. He had a brain infection, people. He went blind. This isn't just "You get pneumonia one day and can't fight it off."

(ETA: I'm also grimly amused that "sex pox" is usually used by these people to indicate feminists who are pro-porn. Porn is generally used as a masturbation aid, and masturbation's guaranteed *not* to give you the sex pox, whatever disease it may be.)

More of the "consent? wuzZAT, you patriarchs?" meme

(zposted from my blog)

http://wom ensspace.word press.com/2007/11/30/todays-m ale-terrorism-exploiting-the-brut al-murder-of-emily-san der/#com ment-72901

I’m wondering (no seriously, guesstimate with me) how long it will take before “rape kill fantasies” are defended. Women collecting en masse (feministing, Bitchphd, pandagon, feminste, etc…) to assure everyone they find pleasure and joy in the sexualization of their own death.

Then police won’t even have to worry with their half-assed investigations–all “murders” of women will be considered assisted suicide (which will become legal once more).

Can we, as radfems, not use words like “want” and “consent” for, I dunno, another 1,000 years? Right now it has F$$$-all to do with us and I’m really tired of such concepts being thrown around.

My heart goes out to Emily Sanders and her loved ones.

I'm not here for long today (yay weekend fun -- no, not quite that kind), but I just want to note it.

I know these people aren't representative of feminism or even of thoughtful radical feminism. But it's often taken as a Feminism 101 point to assume "no one would ever REALLY say 'all sex is rape,' stop putting words in Dworkin's mouth."

And the thing is, whether Dworkin said it or not, there was, and still is among a very kooky, small minority of women who use feminism in some very weird ways, a strain of feminism where this kind of inversion happens. And it makes sense that it would, among absolute extremists, really, because their basic position is that choice is illusory in a world where one social class has control. If that control extends to hearts and minds, consent isn't real, isn't deep, isn't personal...

...so it's hardly surprising someone would go all the way and ask if consent is meaningful in any way at all.

But of course, that's chilling. With no notion of consent, everything is rape.

Or nothing.

Or nothing at all.

As suspicious as some of us are (and rightfully, in some cases, IMO) of liberalism... we do need some liberal concepts mixed in with our radical ones. We need notions of bodily autonomy, free choice, and consent (whether to sex, to medical procedures, to body modifications, etc.) I'm the first to acknowledge that autonomy is a tough one, consent is a tough one, fully free anything is impossible since we're influenced all the time.

But that doesn't mean we abandon these concepts. That means we use our massive monkey brains to be sure as we can of when and how they apply.

DK's contented contemplations: Black or Red...?

DK's contented contemplations: Black or Red...?

I'm just going to link this and not comment, because it's amazing, I have little or nothing to add, and my brain is jell-o today.

Rearranging the World

I've been going around and around in my head about something, and it's one of those things that's ... if only I could explain this to people! It's a neat trick! I! ... but the words are so open for misinterpretation. I know if I tried to say it, tried to make the argument somewhere, that people would latch on to one thing and completely miss the point of what I'm driving at. It's a Mystery experience, and those are notoriously difficult to convey.


But I'm thinking about 'objectification', in its various forms; the specific bit that's relevant to my kink is the specifically sex-object kind, but I don't think that what I'm looking at is limited to that subset.

A lot of people look at the notion of objectification -- of, hrrr, for lack of better phrasing, constraining interactions with the person-treated-as-object to those appropriate for the type of object for duration of the scene or other period, let's define my terms -- and see something horrible. The cutting-away of everything not a part of the object, a reduction of person-to-thing-to-be-used, ignoring anything that doesn't fit in that, which can include dreams, aspirations, basic humanity ....

And when I look back on the ways I've been treated as a sex object nonconsensually in my past -- much of which is, y'know, junior high school crap, those horrible early-teens years -- it is something horrible. Minimising, dehumanising, disrespectful to self-as-person. All that shit, I understand the thing.

And that has nothing to do with my experience of objectification in a kink context.

I was talking with my liege about this the other day, trying to grasp at words to go at the mystery, and he talked about rearranging the world, resizing it. Like how in certain sexual situations, everything outside the bed just stops registering as relevant, doesn't matter to the situation at all. Which can be a way of finding a respite from a relentlessly awful world, for a little while: resize the world.

The sex slave thing is resizing the world and also resizing me. All that other stuff exists, outside the edge of the mindspace, folded up and implicit in my self but not relevant -- the whole question of acceptance, of love, of external value, winds up being evaluated on the success at performing the functions of the objectification.

Which, again, could be seen as an awful thing, but ...

... those folded-in bits aren't rejected, they're still there. Which means that the fact that it's possible to have a fairly clearcut success in the objectified role, a fairly black-and-white pass/fail thing, makes the whole horrible tangle of 'am I worthy as a person' fade to the background: it makes it possible to receive, hear, and believe an unqualified "Yes."

And that unqualified 'yes' doesn't stay constrained to the smaller world. It expands out with the boundaries of reality.


I sit here and look at this experience and say, "This! This is cool! This is useful! I mean, aside from 'this is good sex', this is neat!" and ... have no idea how to convey it to people who don't already know what I'm talking about.

It would be nice to be able to do, sometimes. But talking about narrowing the world like that is just offering up a hook for the antis to snag onto and haul, as far as I can tell. Which leaves me feeling awfully sad.

I shouldn't even be mentioning it, but...

...proof that some people need some time out of the ivory tower:

from http://demonista.livejournal.com/23210.html?thread=101802#t101802

Once again I am in total agreement with you Demonista. S & M adherents over the last few years have been contriving to legitimise their pathetic, childish (and dangerous) practices in the eyes of people who are striving to bring an end to the capitalist system of production and distribution; they have even gone to the extent of formulating wanky theories about transgressing the boundaries of bourgeios morality. The simple answer to them is that they themselves are indulging in activities which only serve to re-enforce the dominant/submisive relationship between the ruling and working classes. Working-class women suffer enough pain and humiliation doing shitty jobs for even shittier wages without having to come home to whips, clips, chains and nipple clamps.
Unlike gay persons, S & M adherents are not oppressed because of their lifestyle, nor do they pose any threat to bourgoise hegemony. What really gets up their rubber knickers is the fact that the majority of people who are active in trying to bring about a truly free, democratic, peace-promoting, egalitarian society, see them as nothing more than a bunch of neo-fascists. Long may it remain so.

Honey, if you lean THAT hard on Marx, your crutch is gonna split in two. You might want some stronger assistive devices. Or a bit more brain exercise of your own.

I love how "bourgeois hegemony" the phrase really means, y'know, the oppression of the working class, but it gets made into the snootiest, most academic phrase ever. It's an interesting twist.

DEAR THEORY KIDLETS: I have a call for you from Reality on line two. Reality would especially like you to note that there are, in fact, gay sadomasochists.

Reality also notes that you have a flair for insulting language. Have you considered phone domming?

And "have to" come home to nipple clamps? I'd love to know what planet these people are living on, where dumping your top in annoyed exasperation is somehow not an option.

Oh wait, er, *ahem* *straightening up* Disregard that. I'm so top I've never been dumped.

NONE CAN DEFY ME! ALL SHALL TASTE MY WRATH! *cartoon villain cackle*

Framing SM in feminist terms

I've been working my butt off for my postgrad degree of late, and most of my written work looks like it's going be centred around BDSM. Excited though I am, when writing what I suppose constitutes some kind of narrative analysis through a feminist framework, I find the language associated with BDSM really problematic. "Domination", "submission", "objectification", "sadism", "masochism", "bondage", etc. Of course, we know these terms don't necessarily have to represent practices that are repressive/oppressive to women, but it's hard to explain them when they are so commonly used by feminists to mean something so entirely different. I think Pat Califia describes this difficulty with buzzwords briefly, but I wonder why feminist SM practitioners have not sought to make changes in the way we use those terms.

Do we need a whole new language of buzzwords to describe BDSM in feminist terms? Or is it partially using these buzzwords transgressively that, to put it bluntly, gets us off?

In other news, I have been reading some interesting books and articles on BDSM and related topics. I'm going to add a booklist to this blog, and would appreciate any ideas you might have, also...