Toward a new expression of sexual freedom

Words like this make me lament that life circumstances prevented me from engaging with maymay in 2009 and 2010 even though we were acquainted before he moved to SF

Somehow, despite all this upheaval, our sexuality communities are trapped inside aristocratic institutions that more often act with an interest in risk-avoidance instead of value-creation.

This from a post about Kink for All, a sexuality conference that started in NY and is going to Denver in February.  I’m going to Denver to check it out.  Secretly I am going to see if I could pull it off at home.  Maymay highlights a point that is not lost on the wider BDSM community – why aren’t young people engaged in the community?  Who are these people who buy the toys but never go to the events?  Why don’t they come share this awesome spirit of community, learning, and exploration?  How do we hook them?  Or more frighteningly, what do they know that we don’t?

My question is this: how do we bring the hacker ethos and the free information ethos (as in beer, and speech, and puppies) to sexuality communities?  And more over, should we?

To the latter question, I say yes.  Because the forces that gave us the public library and the bill of rights are awesome and way way cooler, in my opinion, than the forces that gave us swinger clubs with high membership dues and low representation of bisexual or submissive men.  Because hacker culture is nimble and adaptable, because it restructures quickly around the current needs and because it has room for both the engineer hero and the awesome power of transient community building, and that is a power I want to capture and bring into my sexuality community.  So yes, I want a sexuality community that takes your radical self-resilience and raises you shared resources.

As for the how?  I don’t know yet, but I think maymay is onto something.  I think it starts with breaking formation – I want to take alt sex out of dungeons and hackers out of their prototypical basement caves.  Maymay structured Kink for All around observer-participants, open access to the mic, and free access to the conference.  I think there is one more thing to add, and it’s hard because we don’t want to say it, but I think it’s something my non-sex cultures have that my sex culture lacks:

People will say what you do not agree with and you have to be ok with that.  People will use methods you’re unsure about to meet goals you care about and you need to let your emotional reaction go.  The world will not coddle you, not everyone knows your triggers, people do not enjoy walking on eggshells; that’s ok.  Be excellent to each other, expect difference, take what you can and leave the rest.  Nuance isn’t always paradox and it if it looks like hypocrisy check again, it may well be, but it may also be a different way of looking at things.  Define your win condition, be excellent to each other.

I need something from you:

• I need you to come sit with me, and talk with me and tell me what sexuality community looks like for you.
• I need you to listen, not to me, but to someone who is different from you…take the other to lunch
• I need you to stop waiting for permission and do the thing you want to see done.  Ideally, if we can, I want to do it with you because there is power in shared resources.
• I need a space in which to bring 50-75 amazing people together sometime in May or maybe June to talk about sex and hackers and internet privacy
• I need to find people who care about this, who are willing to sit in a room together and start the discussion
• I need you to start breaking formation, to call people out when their language belittles submissive men, trans people, sexual women, etc
• In short, I need you to wake up, show up, and make some noise.

 

 

Sex blogger office hours

Week from Sunday, January 29th.  2pm till 5ish.  Location TBD but somewhere in SF.  Confused?  Scroll down

Stop bitching and start a revolution

Or as I shouted out on Twitter:

Hey kinky nerds wanna talk about creating more inclusive opportunities for dominant women and submissive men? Like coffee? Free Sunday?

More importantly, do you want to hang out in a neutral space (read not a play space or kink space), chat, and meet other people who are geeking out on the frequently less than ideal structures of the BDSM scene?  Do you have a blog post you’ve been meaning to finish up and need a co-working buddy?  Just feel like you can’t keep up with all the awesome people you meet through activism, blogging, and general rabble-rousing and wish there were office hours for the sex-blogging crowd?

Are you in the Bay Area?  Do you have some free time this Sunday or next? Do you feel like it’s time for a kinky, geeky, politically minded laptop party with beer and/or coffee?

Do you think I’m batshit insane but you’re in the Bay Area free this Sunday or next and willing to humor me?  That’s cool too, please let me know!

The captain has turned off the fasten seatbelt sign…

I have had a hard week of little sleep and strange food.  I dragged my feet all day secretly hoping to miss my flight back to SFO, all too keenly aware of how much I didn’t want to be there.  I replayed the Talk I had with my partner around the edges of sleep the night before over and over in my head.  The sentences I let trail off, where his body tensed betraying his display of casual interest.  The way he made me feel included in a secret cabal that I suspect already suffers from too many kids trying to look cool but lacking the skills to carry the work.  I wonder if we are useful then in adding noise to the system.

To my dismay I got to the airport early, but was choking back tears by the time I got to the ticket counter.  The ticket agent asked if I was ok, but printed my boarding pass anyway.  She spoke slowly, gently explaining my gate number, “29, behind me and to the right.”  By the time I got to security, I was losing it.  Not about anything in particular yet, just a general sort of falling apart.  And then I got to the gentleman who had positioned himself in the now defunct metal detector.  As he directed me to the full body scan, I panicked…I forgot the special thing I was supposed to say, the one he’s not supposed to question, the one that leads him to echo back “opt out, female assist” as though it was some kind of religious call and response.  So I looked confused briefly, offering finally “I’d like to decline, what do I have to say?”  “Say whatever you want.” He directed me to an area on the side and proceeded to other people.  As I watch my fellow Americans step through, feet apart, hands over their heads, one by one; as I waited for someone to call a female assist, I lost it.  It was not the TSA’s fault, and this is not a process I have ever found upsetting before, but after some pretty hard conversations about my country, and after a pretty hard week overall, I couldn’t do it.  I bit my tongue as I considered stepping through the scan, wondered why no one had called for the pat-down lady, and consoled myself with the idea of missing my flight.  I felt alone.  I wanted to recite the constitution, or ask the guy if he felt safe around those machines, but didn’t.  And then another man came – calm, collected, cocky even.  He stood next to me with the words “no need to cry, this is your right.”  And all of a sudden it wasn’t just me, I wasn’t just a trouble maker, I was an American doing the all-American thing of standing up for my rights.  I wasn’t in trouble anymore, just like that I was an annoyed customer again.  And the man next to me proclaiming “I ain’t going near that thing.” As though it was a dirty cafeteria restroom.  And suddenly the security guy stepped back calling out “Opt out, female assist, male assist, 5 and 6.” Clearly, loudly, calmly.

As we stood there a woman came by ready to take her turn in the scan, and stopped next to me, it seemed like she was waiting for me to go first.  I told her I had opted out, so she asked, and I told her, and she stood there so the man told her she had to tell the guard if she wanted to opt out…she was doing that as a nice black lady took me through the security procedure, carefully making eye contact and explaining what she was going to do, gently walking me through the process, and just like that it was over.  I put on my shoes, plugged my phone in, and called C sobbing to ask him to come get me in 6 hours from the other side of the country.  I was amazed that they let me through, though later I realized that I am small, and female, and white.  I am well dressed and well groomed and therefore I am allowed to cry in public spaces, and when I do so people will come to help me because they were told that’s what they are meant to do.  I realized that just before I realized that this is privilege and it is a tool and a crutch, and maybe it is one of those things you do to survive when you’ve run out of other options – use the oldest tricks in the book.

My heart sank as I realized I had left my connection to the part of me I had just found on the East Coast, but then I wondered if radicalizing moments were like super hero awakenings, half traumatic and yet utterly mundane.

Perfect storm

Or “don’t let Con fuck your love life.”

This past weekend I went to a science fiction convention as well as a sexy party with a very dear playpartner. We survived, mostly, for which I am immensely grateful.   Some of this is personal mismatch and some is clearly having put our relationship into pressure cooker of stress without a contingency plan. We’re thousands of miles from home base, underslept, failing at the 5-2-1 rule, running logistics of two people two events and one car, and coming off a week of trying to balance all the insanity of travel.

So contingency plan? I wish I had clear priorities that were said out loud before we got on an airplane.  Which event is prioritized?  Are we each other’s interrupts or are we self reliant and maximizing exposure to others? How much time is ideal for each event?  What’s too little?  What’s too much?  I think this serves somewhat in the same way as ethics…which is to say, not for when it’s easy, but for when you really really don’t want to, but you can stop and align yourself with what you had talked about and agreed upon.  Honestly, I don’t think I would have had a particular stance on which event should be prioritized if I knew my partner was interested in both, but the lack of clarity made it hard to prioritize.

I wish we had taken care of our bodies.  We hit BOS already exhausted and I think we never caught up.  We tried to do too much, sacrificing sleep too often, running tight schedules and high pressure tradeoffs.  Because our priorities weren’t clear, it wasn’t easy to swap out events.  Because things were packed too tightly, not only did sleep suffer but also patience, the ability to take a hit and still recover for the rest of the day and so on.

I’d say also we had too many firsts all put together. His first time at Arisia, and my first time in the Boston office.  Our first time meeting my parents together.  Our first time traveling together and spending this much time together all at once.  My first topping an orgasm control scene that went on for longer than a day or so of ongoing contact, and his having to guide me through that. The blows came faster than we could dodge them, and each point of stressed added to the last.

And there is the expectation you put on time as well. The special eventness of it makes it that much harder, the work you put into making things nice builds attachment which unfortunately can create opportunities for downfalls. A bad hour at home is an opportunity to take a shower, eat a snack and move on. A bad hour at a special event can throw your whole day.  I think at one point or another we each felt as though we were trying so hard, doing so much work, for something that just wasn’t working.

I am hoping that this is the first pancake, the one you mysteriously burn on both sides while it’s still squishy on the inside.  That once we each sleep, and focus on ourselves for a while we can regroup and try again.  And also, I wish I had a word for “this amazing person who is deeply important to me, whom I love and care for, who pushes my limits in ways that are almost but not quite too much and I am grateful for that, and grateful also for the time and energy we share, but I realize that we can not share this time and energy full time and I am grateful for that too” I want a word that allows for that non-full-timeness without being “less than” and I want to say “not full time now” and be fully comfortable with that, without forgoing the possibility of full time ever.  But mostly, I need it to be not less than. (Fuck society?)

orgasm control through trial and error part two

I am learning, interestingly though perhaps not surprisingly, that I don’t get off on not-orgasms.  Not-orgasms are a means to an end, but not sexy in and of themselves for me.  I get off on begging and want, and so I can see the benefit of denying orgasms for some period of time to create more want and spur more begging, but see, it’s just a tool.  I also get off on data.  It’s not that I want my partner to not masturbate, it’s that I want to know about each and every time he does.  I can’t tell you why, beyond the fact that it feels like trespassing on someone else’s private moments and that’s hot in an objectification kind of way.

…I’ll be in my bunk.

Asking the hive mind…

First off, yay I found a chastity blog from the keyholder’s perspective.  W00ten.

Second, I have questions, and since every time I talk about chastity, orgasm control, begging and all sorts of torments that involve, well “maybe” a) traffic spikes and b) you all pipe up I figured I’d ask them here…

1) What kind of support system do you have in place around your orgasm control play (or would want to have in place)?  By this I mean, what happens when you’re, say, horny and, for any reason, grumpy about it?  How do you handle feeling disconnected from your partner?  What happens if you think it’s unfair that she gets an orgasm and you don’t?  What is the immediate next step?  What happens after that?

2) Orgasms are nice and all but they also rock the brain chemistry.  One of the reasons I like it when my partner has orgasms is because I like the happy sleepy space that happens when your brain takes all the dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin around and dumps it in your system.  You have, in post-coital bliss, the building blocks of bonding on a neurological level, so I am wondering what happens to your brain, and consequently your relationship, if you are not regularly experiencing a heightened production of these chemicals around your partner.  Does this question make sense?  Why is no one else talking about it?  Lots of people talk about how depression and/or anti-depressants may impede intimacy because of altered production of these “love” hormones, aren’t inability to orgasm due to prozac and inability to orgasm due to CB6000 similar enough problems from your brain’s perspective to be worth some concern?

Yay a brand new year all for me!

Inspired by Peroxide’s New Year’s resolutions I decided to make some of my own, only I hate the negative nature of resolutions so I’m mixing in some good with some needs improvement:

1. Keep loving what I’m doing every freaking day.
2. Put more miles on my carry-on
3. Actually do the math so that I can quantify the above resolution.  You can’t change what you don’t measure.
4. Fuck the carbs, just buy clothes that fits that extra ten pounds I put on since grad school, and love the curves.  Look at sexy curvy ladies as needed.
5. Read/absorb at least one non-fiction per month in printed paper form.
6. Remember to take my glasses off when I read to save my eyes.
7. Let go of the fact that humans like odd numbered lists and be ok ending at 6, or sometimes even 4.

 

Random and cool

So a couple of random things I found this morning that are making the gears turn in my brain turn slowly through their pre-coffee grog…

First off, Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement, which is a great explanation of what’s been floating around my brain recently vis-a-vis how we communicate a message to not the choir. I actually stole this from maymay’s livejournal which I didn’t know existed but turns out to be wealth of nerdy fun. You can find more context for and critique of this diagram there.

I also tracked down this 2009 post by Calico Lane on the Fetish Business of BDSM where Calico says of TNG groups that fail to attract participants “If your demographic isn’t buying, don’t get mad at them — fix your product.” Actually I’ve seen this a lot in feminist circles too – why don’t young women identify with feminism, don’t they know how much we’ve done for them?!  The idea that your constituency should be blindly grateful for your organization’s work and eager to participate in whatever way you dictate is endemic to the non-profit sector.  Volunteer run organizations feed so much into their core volunteer’s sense of identity that they easily shift from goal achievement to organizational maintenance, by which I mean: they lose focus on their constituency’s needs and broader social outfacing goals and  instead focus on keeping the organization alive, whether by securing funding or securing more members, withoutasking if the organization is still serving a valid need outside of itself.

 

Orgasm control through trial and error

So much to write and so little time!  I’m clearing the mental cache as it were and pushing this post out before lunch so I can get on to things like the business of BDSM and getting your message heard.

I have kinked on orgasm control for years, though the earliest experimentation with this that I remember was in 2007.  It’s one of those things that is far hotter than I expect it to be, and far more work than I expect it to be as well.  It’s also one of the areas where my current partner is well equipped to back lead, so when I realized I was having topdrop from some Tease and Denial (T&D, which I use here as an umbrella term for all sorts of chastity and orgasm control play) we’d engaged in I was at least prepared for it because he had the good sense to warn me.  So, with that in mind, and because I’ve found precious few resources for T&D from the female top’s perspective here are some things I’ve learned through trial and error:

1. As I’d mentioned in an earlier post, I am utterly surprised by how seemingly normal many of the people into T&D are.  Just goes to show you there ain’t no such thing as normal.
2. I think of T&D as an extreme sport even though others seem to label it a gate-way kink.  It’s just too tied up with the emotional aspects of ownership and control for me to write off as just a bit of the old slap and tickle.
3. There ain’t nothing passive about this.  Midori sums this up beautifully in Wild Side Sex (2005, pg. 99-104) where she recounts her first foray into chastity play from the superficial and disastrous first tries “I figured I was supposed to deny him orgasm and sensual genital touch for the entire two weeks of his service to me.  It wasn’t any skin off my back…” to a deeper understanding of the nuances of power involved in this game.  You can think of denial (not getting to come, not masturbating, not getting my partner off and so forth) as passive, but I don’t.  I think of each of those things as vitally active both from the perspective of the bottom and the top.  As a top I am inclined to arouse my partner and monitor their arousal and emotional state far more closely than I typically would, both for my own fun and to keep us on the same page.  And I’d expect that actively not having an orgasm is a lot more work and concentration than surrendering to one.
4. The orgasm you have is as important as the ones you don’t.  This I learned the hard way…I told my partner he wasn’t allowed to masturbate before bed but that he could have an orgasm in the morning.  When morning came, I’d gone off to work, and he wasn’t interested in orgasms anymore; I was strangely distraught.  Is he upset?  Does he not like me anymore?  Did I do this wrong…welcome to topdrop.  Humans are variable, their moods change, what’s sexy at one moment is tiring at another, and there are many many reasons to not want to masturbate all of which are not indicative of a crisis of faith.  But what I did learn from that is that, as mentioned above, T&D is emotionally heavy and my experiments with it need clear end points.  If I want my partner to have an orgasm (and we’ve presumably negotiated this) I need to be there for it, take control over it, and demand that it happens within the confines of my scene.
5. I can deny your orgasms and still not feel in control.  Or, put another way, I need the power to say yes or no in order to make the no mean anything.  I want you to want, and I want you to beg, and then I want to decide what the answer will be, because if I promised you I’d say no for 2 weeks, well then I don’t really get to choose now do I?