When did this happen?

When Aaron Swartz died I cried for days.  I didn’t know him personally, though I’m all but certain everyone reading this has touched his work, and there was a sort of 2-degree social separation.  I cried for Aaron, yes, but I also cried for what my social circle, and to some degree my generation, had lost: one of the most brilliant minds we’d had.  More than that I cried because suicide scares me.  In fact, the whole experience of depression makes me panic; I remember October, each and every October, when I lived on the East Coast and before Seasonal Affective Disorder was a thing people treated, was a frantic time of doing everything I wanted to do before the following March because next would come November with its crying fits and paralyzing fear.  Despite having broken this time-bound ritual, I’ve given up exercise plans because I associate my lowest adult weight with my worst years, and I watch for the creeping signs of depression with a level of vigilance most people reserve for late-night muggers.  But suicide scares me…differently.

I consider suicide to be a fundamental personal choice tied into bodily autonomy, and at the same time I consider it to be a collective failing.  As much as I tell myself that depression is a lying bitch and no one is at fault, I keep coming back to how did we as a community leave one of our own so alone?  Not one, also this one.

Suicide, and it’s more genteel cousin “end of life decisions,” typically reserved for ending a terminal illness early, are things I’ve been aware of since childhood both in familial and social context.  It was such a ubiquitous occurrence that after the 9-11 attacks, at least one person I know thought the heightened police presence had to do with “another MIT kid jumping off a roof.”  I remember not being at all moved by that possibility.  That should scare you, it does me.

I don’t think suicide began to scare me until after college, until I realized the depression and alone-ness that’s tied into it.  And that’s also when it became both a personal choice (again, not mine) and a communal failing.  Because depression is a lying bitch, and because our inability or unwillingness to see eachother’s pain gives credence to those lies.  And so I’m wondering (actually stayed up last night wondering) how do we find ways to support people we love, or people we care about, or hell people who just happen to be in the same spaces we’re in, without concern-trolling.  How do we acknowledge other people’s pain without making them explain themselves to us?  How do we maintain a presence while allowing space?

On the flip side, how do we ask for support?  If you’ve never had an illness that goes on not for weeks but for months maybe it’s hard to picture just how carefully you start curating your asks in a vein hope to not burn out your support structure.  How do we build more supports, and more security around those supports?  And how do you let go of your own past failing as part of a community that let one of its own slip through the cracks?  How do I?

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for, a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to became a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.

- Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 1931

What is incredible here is not only Emma Goldman’s insistence on living her beautiful ideal, but the fact that she has these ideals despite an incredibly abusive childhood, chronic illness, and what is by all accounts a traumatic life.

There was some chatter on my twitter feeds this week about Radicalism vs. Community and if both are possible together.  Intuitively, I’d say no unless you redefine your radicalism around community building.  I’d say this because I work very hard to build and nourish communities around myself and I know just how much bridge building and compromise goes into that.  By contrast, I’d say radicalism is pushing forward your ideals despite anyone else’s opposition and/or personal hardship.  I think community building and radicalism are two faces of the same coin, which is to say, both are absolutely necessary to achieving the whole of the world I want to live in, but they can never be one and the same.  You can’t even see both at the same time.

It’s a little strange really, because radicalism is so prized*, and because I hear flak for all things mundane when I brush up against radical circles, to realize I have consciously and intentionally chosen something else.  And there are some communities that are no longer worth building, but there are others where I can’t be the force of destruction because I want to be here to rebuild once the dust settles.  Which is curious because historically, the people I’ve loved, the people I’ve allowed most intimately into my life, are people who bring me closer to some truer, better, part of myself.  So it’s curious, perhaps, when these people are radicals.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a bit recently about the origins of the blog, and about the different ways people find to live their ideals.  2013 has proven itself to be a year of change, I’m curious to see what comes next.

*If you don’t prize radicalism consider this: we needed the Boston Tea Party, we needed Suffragettes and hunger strikes, we needed the labor movement and the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. All of these things were radical, and all of them shaped the world we take for granted now.

And you feel the PAT-OKC chocking question is unfair because what you did is consensual, you say?

But Susan Wright will be the first to admit that “there is still confusion between consensual BDSM and assault.” What does this bring the Fetlife murderer tally up to now?  Three at the least?  Consent is fuckin’ confusing man!

So, um…

By saying that not flagging a consensual kinkster as a potential predator matters more than getting as much information as possible into the hands of people who need it, you’re really saying that your poor, delicate ego is more important than other people’s physical safety. Their physical fucking safety! If you really believe that, you haven’t been mis-flagged. You are dangerously self-absorbed, if not outright predatory, and people are absolutely right to fear and avoid you.

Now might be a good time to take a good hard look at your community cause if you’re still trying to hide/deny/normalize abuse, you’re every bit as disgusting as your worst visions of mainstream backlash make you out to be.

Listen up, fellow homos—you have been bought, paid-for and sold to the highest bidder. The military industrial complex is so far up the ass of the LGBT movement that it can feel what is being digested in its upper intestines. Talking points and “messaging,” not discussion and debate, are the preferred methods of “communication” in a movement now run and owned by PR-firm trained Professional Homosexuals. Dissent will not be tolerated, and the assimilation of homosexuals into the rest of the militarized American public is complete.

In the fall of 2009, on the eve of the National Equality March on Washington, I covered my first (and only) fundraising gala for the Human Rights Campaign. But before the crowd could be entertained by Lady Gaga, Judy Shepard, and the President of the United States, it was time for a word from our sponsors—the “honor roll”: a nearly 10-minute-long video extolling the virtues of player after player in the military industrial complex.

I understood why certain entertainment sponsors were HRC donors, given their audiences. I had no clue at the time why it seemed like nearly every defense contractor under the sun was shelling out money to a gay rights group. (As of today, confirmed sponsors for the 2013 HRC dinner, still six months away, already include Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.)

Go ahead, read the rest…

Regardless of what you think about PFC Manning, the connection between the LGBT movement and defense contractors is chilling. The corporate sponsorship of Pride events which turns the entire experience into a day-long ad campaign for Bud Light is disgraceful. And the fact that a movement born out of the suffering and frustration of a marginalized group has evolved into a movement that throws some of the most vulnerable members of our community under the bus is truly sad.

But I’m getting ready to do something I consented to. I had a choice, I consented. Consent has shades of grey. The space between “no. stop.” and “don’t stop” is not binary and I think we forget that too often.

So what does consent feel like? First, what does the grey space look like? Typically, when I’m in that grey space, when I’m doing something I’ve consented to but don’t want to do, it is because of something else. When I was younger it was sometimes because I didn’t know how to say “no” politely. Now, when I’m more concerned with my comfort than politeness in these situations, I still do things I would rather not to keep from hurting a partner’s feelings for example, or to avoid an argument. When my sex drive took a nose dive in a long term relationship a few years ago, my gynecologist told me to start having sex slowly and see if I get turned on 10-15 minutes into the sex. This was actually great, and fairly common, advice.

There’s a temptation in these grey spaces to assign blame, except you can’t. What we actually have is a social problem. We tell women – and if you’re in the BDSM scene, submissive people – that it is their obligation to express and defend their limits without considering the complexity of this problem.

Maybe you’re confused now, or indignant? “Well if she says yes how am I supposed to know she didn’t want it?” Or “personal responsibility!” Don’t worry, we’re all being screwed by this together. We tell men, and tops, to ask permission (sometimes we don’t even tell them that much, but I’ll be optimistic) but we don’t fully explain the ways in which consent can be coerced or altered here either.

The thing I find startling, the thing that really fucking needs to change, is that most women I know (and submissive identified people I’ve spoken with, again if you’re reading from a BDSM perspective) have a well developed palette of experiences in this grey space. We *know* that there are different motivations behind our yeses and some of these are “I don’t want to have a fight with you” or “submission is a fetish for not saying no” or whatever else. And I don’t begrudge the recipients of my complicated yeses, but I am a little pissed off that we don’t have these conversations, especially that we don’t have these conversations when we talk about the importance of consent.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here, and say that we don’t have to get it 100% right 100% of the time. Frankly, communication is hard, people’s motivations are tricky and I think coming to a complete standstill over “we’ll never get consent 100% right so lets either stop having sex or stop trying to get it right” is a complete derail. Humans don’t do perfect, stop using that as an excuse to not do *better*. Be honest, do you really have nooooo way to tell if he/she/they want it, or are you just being lazy and taking advantage of a complex problem when it suits you? Do you really think that working toward building consent together is a slap in the face to personal responsibility? Or do you maybe have some personal responsibility in here too? And don’t go the other way on me here, don’t go all 2nd wave feminist and tell me my consent doesn’t exist cause society is busted.

The bottom line is that I’ve both offered complicated yeses and I have blindly accepted them. I’ve been oblivious to “yes” that means “maybe” and I’ve intentionally pushed “maybe” to “yes.” (I think I’ve never pushed an outright “no” anywhere, if I have, I’m sorry, let’s talk…if you’d like to). I’ve been pushed into faulty yeses that I only realized we’re problematic in hindsight (20:20) and I’ve had genuine yeses deferred by partners who were too kind to put me in the former situation (something I’ve found frustrating in the moment but have always been grateful for in the long run.)

I guess all I’m saying is that consent is not a binary state and while “no means no” is a good start, perhaps it’s time to take a look at some complications.

So what does consent feel like? What does it feel like when your tooth simply doesn’t hurt? This one for me is defined by calmness and ease of movement. It’s not arousal, arousal is actually a distinct different thing, consent has something in common with being present.

Complicated yeses come from some exterior need – I’m worried about an argument, your feelings, etiquette – I know what worried feels like. By comparison, memories of consent feel like, well, like a simple statement of fact.

I keep wanting to point to something more than the absents of physiological signs of distress, or something more specific, but that’s really all I have. What does consent feel like to you?

Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy.  This has a lot of uses in a wider ecosystem of internet security, not least of which being to help people from countries that censor the internet to gain free flowing access to information.

So since I’ve been having a surprising number of conversations about Tor for a non-techie, here are some things to fill in the picture:

I run a Tor relay node. When I am asleep or at work or otherwise not using my allotted bandwidth, I run a Tor relay node which helps people in countries with heavier internet censorship than mine access the internet anonymously. I do this because access to information is important to me, because it lets me more fully utilize a resource I already have with minimal effort, and because I’ve lived in one of those more censored counties and I remember proxy servers being super useful for all my cat video surfing.

I do not run an exit node because I do not want to expose myself to the legal liability and I was advised not to by someone who does.

I use Tor to search for things that I might not want to share with the world or see advertisements for later, while I’m at work. I like the added layer of privacy and I like being able to actively curate my digital persona, so, when I am looking for things I don’t want to have as part of that digital persona, I use Tor.   One place you might want to use Tor is when you leave anonymous comments on my, or other people’s, blogs…because even if you don’t sign in with a name WordPress will kindly give me your IP address.

I do not use Tor to log into any service unless I have used Tor to set up the account and each and every time I have logged in since. Facebook knows who I am, where I live, what kind of phone I own, and who my friends are; telling Facebook that I am suddenly in Algeria does not help protect my privacy.

There are arguments for using Tor each and every time you go online, the most compelling of these for me is that anonymity is very important as an option any citizen can choose at any time, saving Tor for special occasions makes it feel like the “overthrow your government” browser when really it’s just as much the “I don’t want to see ads for sexy ladies in my neighborhood” and “get the snooping grandmas of the internet out of my life” browser and so using Tor for all web traffic normalizes it.

Overall, I agree with this argument, but if internet privacy is new to you, I would strongly suggest you spend some time really thinking about the full ecosystem of your anonymity. Again, if you set up a gmail account, say firstname.lastname@gmail.com from your home computer not using Tor, then added your family to a G+ circle conveniently called “family” logging into this account later through Tor is not anonymous. Your location in that moment in time is protected, but who you are is not.

Here are some more resources on internet privacy:

A step by step guide to using Tor for all your web traffic.

A Wired thought experiment in which one of their journalists tries to disappear. Spoiler alert: he is eventually found because he posted on a social networking site suggesting he was going to eat Pizza. Because the writer was on a gluten-free diet his pizza options were constrained enough that someone isolated his possible location and found him.

EFF surveillance Self Defense guide

Love doesn’t hurt. If it hurts it’s something else. Fear. Attachment. Idolatry. Addiction. Possessiveness.

Nobody’s heart aches out of love. In pop culture, love gets conflated with desire all the time. From childhood we learn you can like something, or you can love it, as if it’s only different degrees of the same thing.

Love is all selflessness. It’s the opposite of need and attachment. To an individual it’s a sensation of allowing, rather than seeking. Letting go, rather than grasping.

Love is subtle and silent and delicate, and in its beginnings it can be drowned out easily by attachment, lust and fear. Love must have space, and force is what crowds it out. Love is powerful but it isn’t forceful.

It goes on, and you should totally check it out, but I want to unpack some things cause I’ve been thinking about this.

Love doesn’t hurt. Praise my liberal highschool sex-ed curriculum for instilling in me backwards and forwards and 10 ways from Sunday that love does not hurt.  I didn’t even realize how deep in my brain this fact sat until there was something with a boy, maybe he snapped at me or said something mean (he didn’t hit me), it made me cry and in that moment I had an image of my heavy-set gym teacher in her grey tshirt with a whistle around her neck: “Love does not hurt.  If it hurts it isn’t love.”

Except, sometimes it does, because selflessness hurts.  It doesn’t have to, but the path to enlightenment, the path away from anger and wanting, takes time, and moments on that path hurt.  Sometimes a lot.

There are a lot of things that cohabitate with love.  I can love and want and lust after the same person at the same time.  It is confusing, but also…common.  “I love you” means I want for you what you want for yourself.  I want you to access your dreams and passions, I want you to be happy, peaceful and filled with lovingkindness – unless you need your anger and then I won’t fault you for it.  “I love you” is about you.  “I want you” means just that, I want to be near you, I want you as part of my life, I want to build a life with you.  Sometimes it means I want your body, I physically want you.  “I want you” is about me.  Sometimes these things happen at the same time.  If I love you and I want you are at odds, I love you wins.  This hurts like hell.

Love happens when I feel safe.  Love is not about me, but it can not happen if I do not feel safe.  Maybe for other people it can and does, but I can not yet reconcile being so open and so vulnerable with someone who doesn’t help build the foundation of my safety.  This sounds like love is tit for tat and I don’t have a response to that – I don’t know if love is finite but I do know that the ways in which I express love and the reserves I use to experience it are.

On a very personal level, spending time with other people who had similar desires as I did helped to legitimize my own thoughts and fantasies…

I am pilfering.  I am pilfering shamelessly and entirely out of context, because I just realized something cool happened today: I explained to someone how I didn’t want to deal with the BDSM scene, how the community aspects, the political aspects of it, were deeply unpleasant to me…and I felt heard.  Really heard, for maybe the first time, with openness and empathy.  Without “but how are you going to find partners” or “some groups are ok.”  Without the unrelenting “but this is the only place I/you/we can be accepted,” my sense of I don’t want to do this anymore and I want to be ok with that became…normal, feasible even.

But this thing I am pilfering, it’s important.  It’s important because having examples of the things I want existing in the world is so very important.  Examples let us shape the experiences we fantasize about, they give us language to negotiate these fantasies with others, they normalize what we want.  So what if I don’t have examples of what I want?

“A desire that cannot be named or described is a desire that cannot be valued, acted upon, or used as the basis for an identity.”

Pat Califia in the introduction to Public Sex

You see, examples of what I want are hard to get because what I want is the sex I want with the people I love behind closed doors.  I want a power imbalance in my relationships that is personal and intimate.  I want it to be between my partners and I.  I definitely don’t want to negotiate my relationships with complete strangers.  I don’t want to play in public even though there’s a behavioral science voice in my head that’s all like “but third places and sacred places change how you related to yourself and others…” And you know what, I actually do want sex to be a sacred healing thing in my life (but not the only sacred healing thing in my life).  I want to have the kind of sex that shifts my world not in “ooh yummy” ways but in challenging, emotional, sometimes scary ways – this is why BDSM has historically been more bonding for me than intercourse.  I would also like to have ownership over this, and to have access to it, that is decoupled from the BDSM scene, which has been on my radar far more often for rape and abuse of late than for world-changing pair bonding experiences.

Seeing examples of, well, anything that happens behind closed doors is fundamentally hard.  So while I know that there are people out there having amazing kinky sex without being part of the BDSM scene, I don’t have all that many examples.  I don’t have the experience of my desires, my fantasies, being validated.

So fuck this shit.  I’m a child of the internet, I know I’m not alone, the reason I’m writing this is because I just realized it’s important for you to know you’re not alone.  By which I mean, if I don’t get the example I want, I’ll build it, but I want the next person to have something to link to.

I am not the first to break up with the BDSM scene.  You will not be the last, so find the words for the things you really deeply want, and then share those word so we can expand the vocabulary of what is possible.

I was having this conversation with a friend on Friday, let’s say I have 100 marbles, or maybe jelly beans, doesn’t matter.  On any given day it takes about 70 of these marble jelly beans to take care of myself. Some days are really easy, it might only take 50 jelly beans. Other days, or times in my life it takes much more…when I was depressed it took maybe 160 jelly beans to get through a day, but I still only had 100. Obviously, I made it through depression (I’m actually incredibly grateful for that.) I made it through because other people, people who loved me or people who cared about building community, gave me some of theirs so I’d have the 160 I needed. And that’s what happens with my spare jelly beans too – they go to people who need them for whatever reason.  Sometimes these people need extra jelly beans because they are depressed, but sometimes we just all put some jelly beans in a common pot cause community happens like that.

Jelly beans have a transitive property, and sometimes trading jelly beans is intimacy building in and of itself.  For example, I need 70 jelly beans to have a good day, but if I spend some of my jelly beans to take care of you and you in turn spend some of your jelly beans to take care of me, it balances. If I spend more jelly beans on taking care of you than I get replenished from interacting with you, I’ll eventually burn out. If you give me more jelly beans than you get from me, you might burn out.  And there’s a sorta tricky piece where sometimes if you give me more jelly beans than I want it actually costs me jelly beans to handle and store your surplus gift.

Can trading jelly beans produce more jelly beans in that process?  I think so.

But there is a concept sometimes summed up as Ani l’dodi v dodi li – I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. For me, there is something incredibly intimate about the agreement to take care of each other, I feel supported enough to be safe dipping into my jelly beans. It’s pretty cool.  So, when I say I don’t mind doing something because you do it for me, I’m not saying “let’s keep score,” I’m saying “I feel safe.”

And a little history…

2011 was a really terrible year.  A partner and I broke up around Christmas of 2010 and then spent 6 months trying to make it work before calling it off over the summer.  I was depressed, trying to finish my MA, just not doing well.  One evening, in 2011, I called my aunt’s house…more like aunt twice removed, but whatever.  She was out of town and her mother answered the phone.  Now, I’d met the mother once before when having missed a bus in Ashkelon I ended up in Beersheba for the night and need a place to stay.  I didn’t know her well and had never spoken to her really – well I try to say a polite thank-you-I’ll-call-back-later but she launches into her own story of how she had dated someone and the plans and the hopes she’d had with him, and then it ended, and she was devastated, but she met someone else and built things she hadn’t ever imagined.  And you know what, it made me feel better.  It was maybe the first time in 6 months of breakup that I thought beyond the things I was losing.  She died a few weeks later, and I never got to thank her for the perspective.

There have been so many times since when I’ve been startled by the realization that if the person I was dating and I hadn’t broken up, I would have never reconnected with that sorta shy but always busy kid I’d played with in 2008, would have never gotten back into blogging, wouldn’t have realized that the lack of visible submissive men isn’t a just me problem, or gotten loud about shit that’s fucked up in the BDSM scene.  Hell, I wouldn’t have worked half as hard to build my own tribe or felt like staying in California was a choice I had made for myself.  I would have been happy, the person I was with was a good person and I wish him only the absolute best, but I wouldn’t have been my authentic self.