"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...

And now for fluff

quoted someplace, actually by a feminist I respect:

“I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist.”
-Sally Kempton

So uh, what was that again?

You became a feminist as an alternative to coming all over the place with great glee? :)

(oddly, sometimes reading through the sex wars it seems like this is the case for some folks...)

I am tired of "masochist" as a catch-all for "person with problems who doesn't stand up for himself." Masochism is about sex. It's about fun.

I don't mind jokes. I'm not the "humorless" sort of feminist. But I'm tired of this phrase being presented as this shiningly witty one-sentence explanation of the need for feminism.

That one was older than moldy cheese before I was born.

*stamps dumb quote with [OLD MEME, MUST LET DIE]*

Meredith Kercher

I've been asked several times what I, as a BDSMer, think of this murder. I figure I have to post something sooner or later, so here goes nothing.

Part of the reason I've avoided this is I hadn't even heard about it until I saw mention of it on my friend's blog. I'm still having trouble parsing exactly what happened.

That's a big part of why I've been silent for so long. All I knew until I saw that second post was that someone had been killed, allegedly because she refused violent sex, all taken from this blog post here.

While I could certainly see that any mention of "violent sex" or rape fantasy eventually gets us blamed and dragged through the media, I couldn't see the same direct parallels that something like the Glenn Marcus case would have. I didn't see any direct reference to sadomasochism at all -- what's "violent sex?" What's "sadomasochistic"? Were/are these people connected to the community in any way? I knew the answers to none of that until I saw Daisy's post today.

And, hell, I rarely if ever posted even about the killers and abusers known to be lurking in BDSM. I don't think I posted a lick anywhere about Glenn Marcus, for example, or paid enough attention to know his name, until I saw comments on blogs by his other slaves defending him. So I said "I'm not going to cover the Kercher murder; if any and every psycho who wants 'violent sex' (whatever that even is; like I said, that's so vague I don't know anyway) were my responsibility to talk about and deal with, I'd never get my own voice."

But then I saw this, from Daisy's latest post:

What really sets this case apart is the fact that Amanda had an ongoing narrative, as FOXY KNOXY--a MySpace blogger who openly wrote about BDSM scenarios and had something of a fan-base. One wonders if this case would keep us so enthralled if this pre-conceived character did not already exist, as the Columbine boys also had online personas that dovetailed with their real-life intentions. The Telegraph puts it very plainly, titling their update: AMANDA KNOX WROTE STORIES ABOUT RAPE (all that's required is an exclamation point, or several):

Apparently this person was actually connected with BDSM in some way, did it or wrote about it and knew enough to call it that. And apparently she was popular enough that some people might get their ideas about it from her.

Which matters. People saw this. People read this. Her stories are now evidence in a criminal case. And of course it's shocking and titillating that she wrote them. Perhaps especially so, since she's a woman, and we all expect women not to have these fantasies.

I'm female and have them too. Should I be worried?

What frightens many bloggers, is how Amanda's blog is now being used as evidence.

Moral of the story: Fantasies we write about may one day bite us in the ass, so be careful. For example, if I should write that a certain person makes me sick and I wish they would die, and they end up dead under questionable circumstances, does that automatically make me a suspect? (And if so, is that fair?)

If your roommate ends up raped and murdered and you have written fantasies on your blog about rape and murder, well, talk about some bad luck, huh?

Honestly, I don't know enough about the case to know. I don't know how much evidence links this person to the crime, or if the real story is that there is no evidence and violent fantasy is all they're going on. Is it almost definitely clear what happened, and they're looking for more information about motive, or is this the principal evidence linking this person to the crime?

And even if there is more evidence, what license does that really give the media to portray it all in this way?

I don't know. I've never hidden my fantasies. I've always thought that was the best policy. This raises more questions for me than answers, or concrete fears.

Does anyone know more about what happened?

Sex, Lies, Transmisogyny, and the Heteronormativity of BDSM, pt. 2

Sex, Lies, Transmisogyny, and the Heteronormativity of BDSM, pt. 2

Part 2 of Lisa being amazing. On BDSM:

Her implication is that being a sub, being a slave, being a bottom, whatever you want to call it, is completely passive. That basically, all you do is lay there while your top whips you, drips hot candle wax on you, ties you up in restraints, and so on. The top gives and the bottom receives. That the dynamic goes exactly one way. That the top has power and the bottom does not. That the dynamic is identical to the stereotypical heterosexual missionary sex act where the man plunges in and the woman just lays there and takes it. Healthy BDSM relationships just don’t work that way. They have to be highly interactive, with communication and power going both ways. The top has the power to do whatever she wants within the bottom’s boundaries, and the bottom has the power to stop it at any time. Trust is the primary facet of a strong relationship between a top and a bottom, and Ms. Croson does not even acknowledge this. She can’t afford to, since she wants her readers to view BDSM as abusive heterosexual practices taken to an extreme. The top as an angry, controlling wifebeater, the bottom as a submissive victim who can’t even bring herself to leave her abuser.

This is echoed in the beliefs, when inclusion of BDSM practitioners at MWMF was being debated, and some women believed that allowing them on the land would give the subs a chance to escape these obviously abusive relationships. Some suggested setting up workshops to help them get away - of course, none wanted to get away because they love their kinks and have too strong a sense of themselves to allow others to talk them out of it.

On transgender:

She repeats the same arguments about transgender as she does about BDSM - which is expected, because she wants both equated as the same kinds of “wrong things” in feminist eyes. She again asserts that “where identity springs from is never examined.” What she really means is “Whenever trans people explain their identities, their sense of self, and why they transition, we ignore them and impose our narratives upon their lives. Those invented narratives never examine where identity springs from.” As I mention before, if you differ from the expected norm, you’re almost forced to examine it. I spent years when most kids think about G.I. Joe or Barbies trying to deconstruct what the hell “being a girl” meant vs. “being a boy.” I tried to see myself as a person with both a male and female spirit before I was eight years old. I tried to examine the possibilities that I was just a transvestite, or gay. I questioned constantly how I could know I was a girl when my body said I was a boy. I examined my identity, my sense of self, every way I could think of. I tried to suppress the idea entirely. I never really got to the bottom of it all, but I searched every nook, cranny, and crevice I could find that might give me some hint. I just don’t see how you can grow up with the sense of being one gender, your body being the other sex, and dealing with the messages society sends boys and girls while trying to sort them all out without some serious examinations of what’s going on.

Her argument seems to imply that trans people decide one day that we want to transition, that we’d be more comfortable as the other sex, or life would be easier because we can’t handle being gay - this isn’t much of a stretch, because other articles on Questioning Transgender explicitly lay this out. In her lack of understanding - and her lack of willingness to understand - transgender lives, Ms. Croson imposes patriarchy upon who and what we are.