"People finding satisfaction in being abused"

(xposted from my lj)

I probably shouldn't even bother as this makes utterly no sense, but Hugo Schwyzer has posted a new post about pornography (the previous one is here.) The post itself is thoughtful and interesting, but one commenter is so strange I can't even figure out what she's saying.

Here's a bit of the post itself, included because it actually talks about something I hadn't thought of:

It’s very difficult, I realize, for me to separate my own experiences with pornography from a range of other possible reactions. I have an addictive personality. I was addicted to alcohol and drugs for many years, and have now been clean and sober over a decade. I am not an “anti-alcohol” campaigner, however. I know perfectly well that plenty of people have this remarkable ability to do what I could very seldom do: have one or two drinks and then stop. At family dinners and at cocktail parties, I am confronted with evidence that not everyone who uses alcohol uses it the way I used it — so compulsively that it nearly took my life. I was addicted to prescription pills, too; on the very rare occasions in the past ten years where I have been given heavy-duty pain medication, I’ve always placed the bottle in the hands of a trusted friend or lover. Even now, frankly, I’d be uneasy about a bottle of Percoset in my medicine cabinet. And yet, I know plenty of people who use prescription pain meds as they were intended to be used.

It’s easy to separate alcoholism from alcohol. It’s easy to separate opiate addiction from pain medication. It’s easy to make this separation because there are so many abundant examples of folks who use medication and alcohol in responsible ways. But as someone who was also addicted to pornography in my younger years, what I don’t get to see — in as obvious a way –are folks (men in particular) whose relationship to porn has no negative impact upon their lives. For me, alcoholism was a progressive disease: one beer became eight shots very quickly, so I learned I could never even have the first beer. For me, pornography addiction worked much the same way: I wanted “everlasting novelty”, and was compulsive about seeking out new images. (And this was back in the days before the Internet!) I could no more imagine using porn for fifteen minutes a week than I could imagine having three sips of wine and calling it a night. And just as my addiction to drugs and alcohol fed my narcissism and destroyed my empathy (to the point that some folks thought I might be clinically sociopathic), so too my porn use did tremendous damage to my ability to practice authentic intimacy. But this raises the obvious question: was my lack of empathy rooted in the porn itself, or in the addictive way I used it? Can the two be separated?

Most of us don’t go to social gatherings where we get to see people using porn casually but not compulsively. We don’t get to see the men and women whose porn use brings them pleasure but doesn’t diminish their ability to connect with each other. Indeed, my experiences of talking to other men about pornography began in Twelve Step and pro-feminist men’s groups — settings in which there was an assumption that pornography would almost invariably be spiritually, politically, and psychologically damaging. And while I was aware that many men spoke of using porn without negative consequences, I had a presumption that they were as I had once been: in a state of denial. Like most recovering addicts, I had to fight a very hard battle against a smug sense that I “knew” that no one could use porn without harming themselves or their families. I extrapolated from my own experience, and the experiences of men with whom I worked in recovery or in gender studies circles, and assumed that “almost every” man would be the same. And when I came to Robert Jensen’s work, I immediately identified with his experiences and his views, so fundamentally close to my own. Talk about empathy! It was as if Bob Jensen was my twin brother.

I commented on this bit thus:

Hugo,

Thanks for this post. I think some of the trouble *I* have with understanding the anti-side has to do with never having seen anyone who was doing the “looking for more novelty” thing. It’s honestly so far outside my experience that I’ve always found myself really leery when I hear that. The only place I ever heard or saw it was from conservative religious groups or religious websites, and it struck me not as real people’s experiences but as… how can I best say this?

You know how there are religious groups who say that if you’re gay and struggling, it’s because the “gay lifestyle” is morally bankrupt, wild, and lacking in intimacy? And how those people encourage the confused and hurting men and women who come to them for help and answers to understand their experiences as something like an obsession with attention from people of the same gender? And it’s a whole explanatory framework that doesn’t fit at all with the way most people understand what it is to be gay?

That’s what I always thought the “end porn addiction” groups were like too. I didn’t really think anyone had the addiction. I thought people had, say, curiosity or kinks they felt ashamed of, and went “oh God, now I’m looking at BONDAGE! But I think bondage is BAD! The porn must be controlling me!” and ran off to a group, rather than “Hey, I keep finding myself interested in bondage. Maybe there’s a long-standing interest here I feel I shouldn’t acknowledge. Let me sit down with myself and figure out if I’m OK with this interest I have.”

So I always thought that that “needing novelty” thing was not real, but a way of shaming people for becoming curious about things outside standard heteronormative sex. “Oh, I fantasized about a threesome. Shit, I must be emotionally unfaithful because I was erect for a few minutes!” “Oh, I fantasized about…” whatever, where that’s being measured against the non-kinky, the perfectly egalitarian, or the cuddling with the lights off and only and always expressing eternal love. Which… well, that is some folks’ ideal, sure.

But human minds, in my experience, don’t stay focused on just that. And I feel that a lot of the anti-porn stuff I’ve seen, both from the conservatively religious anti-addiction folks and SOME of the feminist folks, is an ideal that people won’t ever think about non-intimate sex, or the kinds of kinky sex their ideology prescribes. And to me, even if you’re ultimately less permissive than me, that’s unrealistic.

I said a bit more there about my own personal use of pornography (some people in that conversation don't like the term "use" but the only other term I can think of right this moment is "relationship to pornography" which just sounds weird to me, kind of like that really Sensitive Guy-type English teacher on Daria) there, but this is basically my main observation.

I still do think that "porn addiction" is sometimes little more than a popular way of explaining sexual behavior deemed bad. I still worry that some people who are simply wrestling with kinky desires, sexual troubles in their relationships, or other personal issues latch onto the idea that they are addicts rather than doing whatever personal work they need to do, whether it's accepting themselves as kinky, talking with their partners, or dealing with problems they have with intimacy.

I worry that using the paradigm of addiction to explain an ever-expanding series of "bad behaviors" creates a way for people to avoid responsibility or personal hard work, because they can simply claim, as 12-step programs do, that one is "always an addict."

But Hugo's clear description of his propensity toward many different kinds of addictions suggests to me that in his case, and therefore in at least some others, "porn addiction" is an accurate description rather than a popular buzzword. That gives me something to think about, though I remain critical of the ubiquitous and buzzwordy use of the phrase "______ addict."

One commenter to that post, though, simply has my mind boggled. I think she's trying to talk about consensual BDSM or rough sex here, but she uses some very strange (and creepy) words to do so:

I of course don’t want to watch women being victimized or violated and it is, I think, particularly upsetting to watch women in a situation where they are contributing to their own exploitation by reveling in what appears to be straight abuse.

Now, when I was in grad school, we did discuss the possibility of consensual exploitation, so it's not like it's totally impossible. But that's really a question for the philosophers. This here... "reveling in abuse" is just totally bizarre. What would it mean to revel in abuse? And what would it mean to contribute to your own exploitation? I don't think you can presume that exploitation is consensual without giving a careful, and clear, statement of what you mean by consensual exploitation. And if consensual exploitation is something like, for example, "Yes, I'll take the job in the sweatshop because it's all I can get," it's very hard for me to see how a person could be truly enthused about it.

Or is she saying that the person is reveling in something that looks like abuse -- as in, we may know because she told us that she likes BDSM or rough or "gonzo" sex, but her viewers will not? And that they will, by Pavlovian frenzied masturbation, learn the "message" that women love abuse? That could be it. But if that IS it, why say that the women are contributing to exploitation? Maybe the idea here is that women in rough pornography are aware that other women will suffer as a result of their work, and don't care and should? But no, it says "their own exploitation." So apparently they are creating their exploitation, in an eager way.

Is it just me, or does this sound a whole hell of a lot like Freudian theories about female masochism that suggest that women crave not just consensual BDSM but actual abuse?

She "clarifies" later, and to my mind it just gets worse:

I don’t understand how there can be a solid connection between someone finding satisfaction in being abused and it being okay to abuse. They are actually two different ideas.

Just because an individual seeks abuse (which is what some workers in the porn industry seem to do) does not give another the right to abuse but it does not change the psychological issue with the individual seeking abuse that compels them to put themselves in a situation in which they can allow others to exploit them or where they can exploit themselves.

....One major problem that I have is the comparison between porn and domestic violence. Women who find themselves being abused by their spouse or another family member or friend certainly do not enjoy it I would hope. But there are individuals who will intentionally place themselves in situations where they are being abused and used and they find satisfaction in it because of an unhealthy self image and/or deeper psychological problem.

So some people have problems and it leads them to like being degraded. Sounds an awful lot like the popular stereotype of the masochist as someone who gets beaten because he believes he doesn't deserve better.

And yes, there may well be people like this. All kinds of strange propensities exist in humans. But she offers no way at all of understanding which sex workers these people are, who they are, or why she associates them all with rougher porn. Surely if this kind of thing is as widespread as her comment hints it might be, there are some people out there who do standard or even sweet-looking stuff because they've internalized the idea that they are good for nothing but sex. If we want not to see those people, how do we figure out what they're in? Simply avoiding kink because that's where we think we'll find it really doesn't narrow it down.

And if we do assume this is a widespread problem in the industry, why is the solution not watching these women's work rather than figuring out who they are and giving them alternatives? Simply boycotting their films for the sake of not being contaminated by consuming images of their exploitation doesn't help them to regain self-esteem, or stand up for themselves, or leave the industry if that's what's best for them.

It just strikes me as standard equating kink with abuse, wrapped in a layer of false (or at least useless from a practical standpoint) sympathy for women you're defining as victims without knowing anything about.

And now for the latest installment...

of People Who Have Their Priorities Totally Backwards.

I'm being terse and snarky here because if I weren't I'd get very sad and angry. Suffice it to say that when we accept the idea that something's being consensually sadomasochistic makes it wrong, yet at the same time accept that state-sanctioned torture is not wrong, we have everything entirely backwards.

I think I am going to be sick.

And for the record, in case anyone takes this to mean I don't think Max Hardcore's porn is creepy, I do.

(Link contains potentially triggering, but entirely legal, photos of legal violence.)

Why BDSM?

I've just been thinking a bit about radical feminists, and wondering why they are bothered by BDSM, exactly. I know the theory: sexual desire is socially constructed, and BDSM is an exaggeratedly intense version of the same-old, same-old male dominance and female submission. (If people have questions about this theory itself, I'll go into it more in the comments and give links. I want to get on to the real point and spare my typin' fingers.)

All that's understandable to me, though I disagree with it because I'm not the kind of radical social constructionist that these people are. The thing that's not understandable to me is this:

Radical feminists are quick to point out to any kinky person who feels uneasy hearing that her fucking is just standard heteropatriarchy that they're not trying to control what anyone does in bed. "I'm not trying to take your whips away," etc. They'll be extremely careful to mention this, and understandably irritated when someone goes "They're trying to make me hang up the whips and go home," given how clear they are that this isn't what they want to do.

What I don't understand is exactly what good the theory does at all, if they're not trying to change people. I understand why the theory matters if they're right about pornography and prostitution. If it is the case that much of pornography involves coercive production conditions, that's bad and that should be stopped. So the theory gives us a very vague outline: Stop pornography. (It still doesn't, IMO, say enough about how, but at least that's clear.) Even if the production conditions aren't coercive, the message can still be "Stop pornography," because the other prong of argument is the idea that pornography trains men to pressure, coerce, or even rape women. We want a world with less rape, so we want those messages to be less ubiquitous. So we have something to go and do, somehow: Stop pornography.

But the thing about BDSM is that even many radfems accept that at least a minority of us do BDSM consensually enough that they don't want to take our whips away. So the conditions aren't coercive. And we're not a multi-million dollar industry that it's a cultural commonplace to use or watch, as porn is. So we're not selling the degradation message, even if it is in fact the case that we have bought it ourselves.

So it's odd to me that some radical feminists are still picking on BDSM. There's no serious activist reason I can figure for them to do that at all, really. They're not aiming to stop a message, and they're not thinking that it's nonconsensual, so there isn't any reason for them to be "Stop BDSM." Which would leave trying to convince individuals to give it up, which they say they're not doing.

Which leaves this interestingly free-floating theory, under which BDSM is bad for women. But that theory just sort of sits there, and becomes fodder for blog posts on the Internet, but not fodder for activism. And I just wonder why. Why do you need a theory that says something's bad, if you agree that taking any action to stop the badness would be thought policing so you don't do it? Because that honestly just sounds like you want the theory around so you can tsk-tsk at people, rather than that you're actually using the theory to fuel actions based on feminist principles.

Oh wow, how'd I miss this?

From late August, a post on Amananta's blog, apparently a response to this post I made here in mid-August or so. Excerpts and then comments (not fisking. I'm sometimes nice). I've added paragraph breaks to make it a bit easier on the eyes:

Most interesting is the corners they try to paint any feminist who dares question BDSM. Usually they will say, upon reading any criticism of BDSM from a feminist standpoint, that we just must not know anything about it, we must be ignorant about how truly wonderful and sexy and enlightened their “underground” society is. But when someone as myself or Biting Beaver reveals we have lived that lifestyle for years and hated it due to the abusive nature of said “lifestyle”, we are told “it’s just you”. It must just be me, just because “I didn’t enjoy it” doesn’t mean other women can’t! What’s wrong with you that you didn’t enjoy it?

Then there were the ones who feigned some sort of coyness: “She says she was involved with the BDSM lifestyle for 15 years, what does she mean?” I mean I lived it, from any number of angles, no, not just one, and not just with one man, it wasn’t a problem of just it being “the wrong man”. Then there’s the clincher which would be floor-rolling-laughter funny if it weren’t just so fucking sad from someone who thinks they are a feminist: “If she didn’t like the lifestyle WHY DIDN’T SHE JUST LEAVE? WHY DID SHE STAY SO LONG?” All of this: “it’s just you” “its an individual problem” “why didn’t you just leave” are the farthest things I can think of from a feminist standpoint.

Okay, first thing: Yes, I did in fact say "Why didn't you leave?"

However, I wasn't referring to a person there, I was referring to the Scene itself. The paradigmatic reason people stay in abusive relationships is usually that they are wrapped up in a particular dynamic of violence and terror with a particular person who they alternately idealize and live in terror of. It's very dyadic, and it often comes with particular attempts on the part of the abuser to isolate his victim, so that she remains unaware that his behavior is unacceptable. The more time she gets away from him, the more chance there is that she will realize either that behavior she has been taught to excuse ("he's just angry" "he's jealous because he loves me so much" "he had a bad day") is actually out of line. So there's this very isolating bent to it all.

But the Scene itself is not an abuser. It is not a person that can force you to stay for fifteen years if you are ideologically opposed to it. Particular partners can force or coerce or terrorize you; The Eulenspiegel Society can't. That's what I meant by "why didn't you leave?" I don't believe that a social community can batter a woman.

Well... maybe not. There are such things as cults, and she might mean by mocking my comment that I should have understood that she was indoctrinated so severely that she couldn't break free, and had taken on "BDSM's Value System" or something because BDSM communities are cultic. That would at least make more sense, and fits with some of her other comments about how BDSM supposedly makes people see behaviors that are obviously ethically unacceptable as right dandy.

The thing is that I just haven't seen cultic dynamics in SM groups, and I'm very familiar with them. Those kinds of group dynamics are the sorts of dynamic that silence people if they disagree, pressure people if they don't want to do something, etc. And I have never seen this. I've never seen anyone at a demo say "and if you don't want to do this you're not good enough." Or, you know, "you're not really ONE OF US if..." (I have seen a little bit of this in some online circles, though. But it certainly doesn't sound like she means "I lived it" as "I hung out on Gorean message boards.") What I do see is people bending over backwards to remind people that they need not do anything they don't like, that what works for one person or couple or group may well be disastrous for another, etc.

So I'm left utterly flabbergasted, really. It's possible that smaller kinky enclaves are less well-policed and more pressure can happen there. So it may be, "I passed up the groups in the big city because I just didn't think they were TPE enough and joined TrueSlaveHearts out in bumfuck, where you had to write contracts in your heartsblood to prove you were SEEEERIOUS." But in that case, how is that a reflection on "the Scene," whose face is actually, you know... TES or Black Rose or APEX or places like that?

She calls me young, and I probably am younger than her. But really, how can you even talk to someone who won't give specifics at all? Who says, "the Scene is like this" and doesn't say, "this is what the presentations were like, this is how people acted at parties, this is what my partners said?" How is that any representation, when it's just "I'm older than you so I don't have to tell you what I'm actually talking about, now shut up little girl?"

And really now -- "little girl"? I'm a "little girl" now because I disagree with her? And obviously I haven't read anything from the Second Wave!

Who exactly has given up power dynamics here?

Parte Tres

Part 1 - Part 2

Latest bit in this blogthrash is someone over at Demonista's telling me that I must not understand what anti-SM feminists' position is.

I suppose if I properly understood it, I'd have no choice than to agree with its utter brilliance?

I truly love how people can't answer my actual point -- that the pressure is the same from both sides -- and instead have to ask me how exposed I've been to the theory.

Let's see now: Against Sadomasochism is on the shelf to my left (though I'll likely need to acquire a new copy, as this one was used when I got it and after what is it now, seven years? it's completely falling apart), as is the Bartky book containing her masochism essay (though some people might not think her essay is anti-SM enough). I don't own Dworkin's Intercourse, and haven't read it in long enough that I can't recall how much specifically is on BDSM, but I do have at least one snippet of it saved in some old research papers. Parts of it are also easily found online here, though, so I could look at least some of it up again. Her essay on Story of O is also there, and I re-read it just two days ago actually. As is the snippet of Ice and Fire where she specifically mentions training a man to abuse her by, in part, teaching him BDSM. (Which is not theory, but the message is clear.) I've also read the essay that Lisa of QTp fisks here, though the site it comes from is no longer up.

I'm sure there's something big I've not read, but one would think I'd understand the general gist of the theory by now. :)

This is the song that never ends...

yes it goes on and on my friends...

I'm not sure if this comment is a response to this post from me, but given that it talks about female tops and there's no other piece of that conversation that does, I think it might.

Laurelin:

Obviously, my remarks re: the morality of harming others do not apply to such situations in which women are pressured into being 'tops'. It is abusive to pressure others into performing acts which they consider repugnant or contrary to their dignity; the pressures on women to behave in certain ways are so strong that I would not presume to judge women 'tops' on this basis. Men have physical, economic, social and sexual power over women in this crappy patriarchal world, and their power to coerce women through emotional blackmail or violence should never be underestimated. Even when the man is not intentionally pressuring a woman into certain actions (he may perceive himself to be making a simple request which can be declined), the internal and external pressures that work on women may make them feel that they can't refuse.

http://archiveofthebitingbeaver.wordpress.com/2008/04/20/sm-story/ is worth reading. Hell, everything by the wonderful BB should be read.

Okay, will stop talking to myself and go and do some work. Really! :)

Me:

I'm not at all sure where this "pressure" thing is coming in. A charitable reading would assume that she has experience with this pressure, either because someone pressured her into being a top or knows people who have been pressured into it. A less charitable reading would be that she's claiming that Suzanne or I was pressured into being tops, and that she sympathizes with us and "doesn't judge us" (right) for going along with the patriarchy.

Except that, well, I can't speak for Suzanne, but that never happened to me. What I do in sex was, believe it or not, my own idea.

Which is where this whole brand of "feminism" falls apart for me. There's this strong assumption that women can't have their own desires and their own needs and pursue them. If your desires don't fit the theory they like, you must never have had them. You must be hiding the truth about some man that made you do it. Or you must have been pressured somewhere in your childhood, some time you can't remember, that shaped, warped, and destroyed you. Your own words about your own life simply cannot be trusted.

Which is very odd to me coming from "radical feminism", considering that radical feminism's roots, as I understand them, were very centered around listening to women's lives and experiences. Consciousness-raising was all about letting women sit and talk and name their experiences for what they were. That space to be heard and trusted and to be taken as telling the truth about yourself and what you wanted and needed did great things for women. Battery became something that society took seriously, rather than just something the king of the house did in his private castle that wasn't anyone else's business. Marital rape was named for what it was: not a husbandly right, but a violation like any other.

Yet here we are, mumblemumble years later, and suddenly feminism is about assuming that someone is lying when she says she knows what she wants, or when she says she wasn't pressured or harmed. Funny, that.

I am not lying. I do not care whether enclaves of feminists find me distasteful, feel that I am confused, or think that I should stop. That's all fine with me.

I do care about the implication that I could not possibly know my own mind, or that I am lying about it.

For all the good it will do: Laurelin, stop. You have every right to express your opinion, but no right to talk over other people describing their own experiences.

(Also, if "everything BB has written should be read," let me add something of hers that I believe everyone should read, too.)

ETA: The post this comment comes from has been locked. I think the part I quoted is the entirety of her comment, but I don't remember.

And some people do still apparently think tops are rapists...

A snippet from a LiveJournal comment by Laurelin (of the blog "Laurelin in the Rain"), initially on pornography, but branching out by implication to plenty of other things.

And I'm sick of the 'consent' argument used by abusive men- if someone asks you to push them off a cliff, because they like it, and you do it, how does that make you any less a murderer? If you beat a woman because she 'likes' it, how are you any less a batterer? If you are willing to harm people this way, you need to lock yourself away from women... so they don't have to lock themselves away from you. The moral bankrupcy (can't spell) is astounding, the lack of empathy and responsibility for one's own actions unforgiveable.

I really need something more coherent to say to this nonsense than "Fucking hell," but at the moment it's not coming.

I'm not a straight male top, but... I spent quite a lot of time as a teen going to shrinks specifically because I thought being a sadomasochist meant I *should* be locked away so as not to harm people, consenting or not.

Laurelin will probably take this as evidence of how thoroughly morally bankrupt the patriarchy is that no one ever did commit me and most tried to help me learn to like myself, but as far as I can tell they were right... and I think my partners would say the same, though if we're presuming me a rapist, perhaps it's better to ask them.

Aside from my personal feelings of complete rage that someone knows based on politics and nothing else whether I deserve my liberty (or do I get a free pass because I happen to be female? Sounds quite essentialist to me, which that side is always claiming not to be), I think there's political reason to be bothered by this as well.

And that is that if you define a batterer as someone who does what they do regardless of consent, then you erode the distinction between sex and rape. Rape is no longer about what someone wants and doesn't want, but about which actions line up on some Official Political Scoreboard with degradation and which don't.

And going down that road is dangerous, to me, because however well-intentioned we begin, it's destined not to capture some people's realities. What happens when battery has a specific definition, for example, and touching someone gently while gazing into her eyes and cooing doesn't fit it, and she didn't want your hand on her? What is she supposed to do?

Or is the new definition of rape something like "anything someone doesn't want and this appended list of things they do?" Well, that's marginally better, but then aren't you losing the heart and soul of what's wrong with rape in the first place?

Rape isn't wrong because specific actions, such as putting a penis into a vagina, are wrong. Those things are not wrong at all in the proper context. Rape is wrong because it violates a person. It disrespects her bodily autonomy. It treats her body as something she doesn't control. None of which applies at all to anything anyone consented to.

Now, could someone, in the recesses of his mind, be thinking "God, I hate this fucking slut, and I want to destroy her with my Corrupting Evil Polluting Wang of Poisonous Evil" as he does whatever, while blissfully unaware she thoroughly enjoys everything he does? Sure, and in that case, yes, he is a horribly nasty git... but how is he a rapist? Rape is not a mindset or an attitude, it's a violation.

Egh. I'm not even sure I'm adequately coherent here. But this whole redefining rape as "whatever our theory says is bad for women" rather than as "nonconsent" (or even as anything about women feeling violated!) not only bothers, but honestly scares me.

I honestly pray that these women never find themselves in that world, trying to explain "But... I didn't consent!" to people who understand rape as only what the theory of the day considers degrading.

The DSM revision petition (US-centric)

The NCSF's latest Big Project is activism to remove "paraphilias" from the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (The DSM-V). In the last edition, diagnoses like "Sexual Sadism" and "Sexual Masochism" hung in a strange limbo. If you enjoyed SM, also liked other forms of sex, were satisfied with your sexual life, and didn't do anything nonconsensual, you weren't mentally ill. But if you needed SM exclusively to get off and were distressed about it, that was considered to be a mental illness.

Various groups have been trying for a while now to get that taken out again, and now NCSF (and others, probably, too) have stepped up the fight.

So why haven't I said anything so far, or found myself unreservedly thrilled about this? My reason for hesitation is that the paraphilia section includes pedophilia as well, and I am not sure how I feel about removing it.

Some years ago, I was totally convinced that all the paraphilia diagnoses needed to go. All the things in the section -- including pedophilia -- struck me as fetishes, as fixed sexual things about a person. I was convinced that pedophiles are just people who happen to have fetishes for kids' bodies, and that the sad thing isn't so much their desires but the fact that they can never act on them without doing harm. I was convinced that depathologizing their feelings would help some of them to find creative ways to deal with their desires for children without actually having sex with children -- age play, fantasy, etc.

I'm still half-sympathetic to this. I do think humans have fetishes, and often cannot control what they'll find arousing. I think some of us end up with rather outlandish fetishes, and while plenty of people snicker at those, few people really bat an eye. That's just how desire is for some people, and so what? If people can find themselves in transports from balloon-popping, surely someone out there's going to draw the short straw and lust after prepubescent humans for no discernible reason, right? Compounding the inevitable ethical dilemmas by already branding whoever drew said straw a danger and an enemy might just prove dangerous.

But I'm no longer sure. I spent some time on the website Perverted Justice, where adults pose as children to humiliate and hopefully to catch pedophiles looking to have actual sex with kids. (Yeah, their techniques do worry me some; if it's not entrapment, it's close.) I read a few of the chat logs they posted to the site, and the more I read the more I saw patterns. These men (I never saw any women) clearly weren't people struggling with an inability to sexually respond to human adults. Many had wives and girlfriends. The men would befriend the "child" chatting with them, and as soon as the "child" was nervously half-convinced to trust them, they would begin threatening, talking in abusive language, etc. They would insist that the "child" belonged to them, that the "child" was supposed to obey them. (Some appropriated BDSM-type language, calling the "child" their submissive, pet, or slave, and going into towering rages at any "disobedience.")

While I did see a few chats that fit the "fetishist who's convinced he's being harmless, poor sod" model, I saw this domination thing happen over and over too, and it worried me considerably. It seemed to me that these people, far from having a different conception of sexy bodies than the rest of us, had a desire to dominate and to harm weaker, more insecure people.

So I worry. I wholeheartedly support the removal of SM and other kinks from the DSM. But I want to see more evidence about pedophilia. I want to know if those men I read about were simply the criminals, and most people have a fetish, or if that's the real face of pedophilia.

Plagues

This article examines the issue of MRSA (antibiotic-resistant staph infection), and how the media reported it -- as a new menace to the gay community. I can still remember first hearing about it from a veteran of the leather scene, her silver-haired, wrinkled face knotting in worry. "It's a skin infection," she said. "You can get it anywhere. We scrape and abrade skin, it's how we play. If it comes here, we're all doomed. That could kill us all."

I don't know when she got into leather, how many years she's been around. But I could see ghosts in her eyes, and I knew exactly whose they were.

I remember going home, terror gnawing at me. All my life I've had the suspicion, deep in the kernel of my soul, that maybe the fundies are right. Maybe VD is "recompense for our iniquity," growing in our skin.

When someone I knew developed a rash I lost it. I was convinced doomsday was upon us all. I called my doctor, half-panicked. MRSA. Is it coming?

I looked it up online. I found more references to gyms and sports teams than to swingers, sadomasochists, or evilly promiscuous queers. Huh, I thought.

I got the call back from my doctor. No, no way. That's people in hospitals, mainly, he said. Some people in the community get it, but not many. If he had a doctor look already, I wouldn't worry much.

And I just sat there shaking and wondering. Why are these plagues always supposed to be about us and for us? The queers, the swingers, the leatherfolk, the people who are too easy and "deserve" it? Why do we make the news? Why do we take cover before anyone even knows what's going on?

Silly Nonsense of the Week(end)

A recent post of Ren's brought Heart's latest to my attention:

Well, you know, women say they enjoy a lot of things. I said I enjoyed being a fundamentalist Christian, wearing a head veiling and long dresses, and being a loving and submissive wife. Sometimes women say they ejoy being hurt during sex. Women say, at times — and believe it; for reasons related to our subjugation, we often filter out memories of pain and trauma – that they enjoy addictions of various kinds, like to alcohol, substances and all manner of intentional self-harm. My saying I enjoyed my old world doesn’t change the fact of all the ways it harmed me, my children, and all the ways it continues to harm ALL women. Women in my old world claiming they choose it and find it liberating or empowering doesn’t change the fact of all the ways it harms them and all women and, especially, doesn’t address what is most important: that if my old world and the way it subjugates and harms women ended today, that would be the absolutely best case scenario for all women, including those in my old world. And absolutely, it’s the same thing when it comes to the selling of sex for money.

The "sometimes women say they like this AND BELIEVE IT" bit is just... wow.

Uh, there's no way for you to be mistaken about what you like. You can be mistaken about whether it's good for you, or be stuck in a rut and continuing to do something you no longer like, yes. But you can't be mistaken when you claim to like something.

I think I really like dark chocolate. With whom should I double-check this to be sure it's true?

Should I not take my partner seriously when he asks for more erotic pain? If his own reports are untrustworthy, who knows better than he does what he actually likes? If his own reports are untrustworthy, why does he react to more intense stimulation more positively? With whom should I converse to determine what he actually likes, if it's not him?

Or are men magically capable of knowing what they like, and only women are not? I'd assume this would have to be the case, as the whole reason she gives for women being wrong about their masochism is the way women are socialized under patriarchy.

I think that's the thing I find most offensive in all this. The idea that because my partner is a man, he actually does things he wants to do and likes what he does. Where any woman (does that include me? I'm female and a top...) does things she thinks she likes, and she's wrong.

What that says is that men get to live happy lives, good lives, positive lives, and women never can. Because women can't even be trusted to tell what's good for them. And more than that, can't even be trusted to know what they enjoy or don't enjoy.

I keep thinking of the disability rights movement when I look at this. I think of someone saying, of a family member with a developmental disability, "Oh, she's fascinated with [topic], but she doesn't really like it. Let's not do that with her now!"

If anyone said that on her blog, she'd rightfully be called out on it. But because feminism is the topic at hand, and because there's a long tradition of investing what women do with political meaning regardless of their own opinions, people let this kind of thing pass. It's just second-wave thinking! We know it's not quite right, but we owe "radical feminism" because it's our history!

Which chaps my hide so much. We can acknowledge that our foremothers had worthwhile things to say, and even more importantly that they had important things to DO, like set up DV shelters, without accepting a framework of "theories" that implies calling bigoted nonsense some kind of feminist revelation. Theories that lead to conclusions like this like these aren't good for women. You can't help women by not taking seriously what they actually say about their lives.