Maybe Days

This simple information graphic depicts various forms of...

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 20:33:00 -0800

This simple information graphic depicts various forms of privilege and oppression as a set of multiple spectra (lines) that all intersect at a central point. The ends of each line is labelled with the “privilege” on the top half of the graphic and its corresponding “oppression/resistance” on the bottom half, while the line itself is labeled with the associated “-ism”. While the graphic doesn’t use the term, it can therefore be considered a visualization of kyriarchy.

The various privileges and oppressions along with the “-ism” they relate to, respectively, depicted are as follows:

Male and masculine/Female and feminine - gender “deviant” (Genderism)
Male - Female (Androcentrism)
White - People of color (Racism)
European in origin - Non-European (Eurocentrism)
Heterosexual - Lesbian, gay, bisexual (Heterosexism)
Able-bodied - Persons with disabilities (Ableism)
Credentialed, highly literate - Nonliterate, uncredentialed (Elitism)
Young - old (Ageism)
Attractive - Unattractive (Politics of appearance/lookism)
Upper and upper-middle class - Working class, poor (Class bias/classism)
Anglophones - English as a second language (Language bias)
Light, pale - Dark (Colorism)
Majority religion - Minority religion (Religious Oppression)
Fertile - Nonfertile/Infertile (Pro-natalism)

Due to the complexity of kyriarchy, there are several glaring issues with this visualization. First and foremost, it’s incomplete, arguably inevitably so. Future versions should consider augmenting it with the following additional axes:

Neurotypical - Neuroatypical (Mentalism aka. sanism)
Dominant - Submissive (Domism)
American - Non-American (American exceptionalism/American privilege)
Coupled - Single (Couple privilege/dyadism?)

There are surely many more missing axes, which I encourage you to suggest in the comments or reblogs of this post. (The above are simply examples to showcase the diagram’s incompleteness.)

The other issue with this visualization is that it is dangerously binarist. In trying to elucidate the ways in which, as opinion8d said:

Many of us are multiply privileged and multiply oppressed. They don’t counterbalance each other. [Unsurreptitiously stolen from Crawford, 2006 - Transformations: Women, Gender, and Psychology.]

the graphic creates a privileged/oppressed dichotomy without acknowledging the fact that both privilege and oppression are context-dependent. For instance, in assigning youth the privileged position along the ageism axis, it makes invisible the various oppressions of adultism. This is why, in discussions of privilege, it is vital to remain cognizant of the difference between categorical and non-categorical privilege.

It is, of course, arguably impossible for anyone to design an info graphic that is 100% complete. Similarly, I think it’s foolhardy to attempt to deconstruct all this incredible complexity without appropriately scoping our conversations, defining our terms, and in the process excluding certain concepts, experiences, or identities from a given (but not every) discussion. And even if it were possible, I don’t think it would be very useful.

As I’ve said numerous times before:

Dichotomies are genuinely useful, even necessary. We use them all the time to make sense of the world around us. In fact, dichotomies themselves conveniently come in two mutually exclusive varieties! These are: true dichotomies, and false dichotomies.

Many people often get very (and I do mean very) angry at me for using tools like analogy and bisociation to make legible various forms of oppressions (“-isms”) that they do not often understand. For instance, there seems a large contingent of the trans* community (as though “the trans community” were a monolith, which is false, of course) that seems endlessly frustrated with me for my attempts to raise awareness of sexism and its intersection with domism by borrowing from trans experience.

While I understand the frustration, I feel, as I said during my Atlanta Poly Weekend 2011 seminar:

This is what in-group/out-group, us/them, you-versus-me, thinking looks like. This is how privilege hierarchies are created and recreated time and again.

Rather than conceptualizing privilege and oppression as a categorical dichotomy, a static and universalizing force, what if privilege were conceptualized as difference plus obligation? That is, since we are all “multiply privileged and multiply oppressed,” in those areas where we have privilege, we ought also couple it to an ethical obligation to use that privilege in the service of those who do not have it.

By the same token, what if oppression were conceptualized as difference plus creativity? Those who resist oppression are inherently creative. Even in acts of destruction, those who resist oppressions are creating spaces for difference, sometimes simply by virtue of their bold acts of survival.

Think about it: privilege is emptying. For instance, what does it mean to be “white”? It means to be not a person of color. What does it mean to be male? It means to be not female, for that would be “unmanly”!

I think that if we were able to internalize a fluid understanding of privilege and oppression, if we could queer the very concepts themselves, we could reliably gain the power to imagine people complexly, and thus treat one another far more humanely than we are often rewarded for (not) doing today.

Individualism versus Systems Behavior: You are not a special and unique snowflake

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 17:12:00 -0800

Last night, I attended Matriarchy at The RACK Room in Denver, Colorado, at the gracious invitation of the venue’s owners, Jeff and Headmistress Saskia. The event bills itself as:

[O]pen to ALL women (sub, slave, top, mistress, cis, trans, female-identified, etc.) and men wearing their sub, slave or bottom hats.

Men are welcome at the invitation of a female guest, but must come in a bottom, submissive, or slave role and are not allowed to top in scenes at Matriarchy events.

Apparently, the event’s been happening since at least December, 2010, when Saskia described it as:

[A] party for kinky women (including trans), be they dom, sub, switch or other. Males are allowed only as guests of a female and are considered in service to that female for the evening. Males aren’t allowed to do much of anything at this event unless a woman gives them permission.

The party’s turnout was small (maybe about 20 people or so). It also—thankfully—had a far more casual attitude around that stupid protocol than either the event’s or Saskia’s phrasing seemed to suggest, though I don’t know how much of the casual attitude was caused by the party being, well, not much of a party. The “lots of play” promised by the event invitation was had almost exclusively by the evening’s hosts, themselves.

I was there to talk about KinkForAll Denver, which I did. But I was also there because, hey, BDSM parties are where I Work, which I did, too. Such events are a bit like distributed laboratories, offering me a way to observe structural patterns in what ignorant people consistently insist is simply individual preference; having the privilege to access these laboratories in disparate locales is one of the things that helped me understand the ways in which The BDSM Scene is actually a systemic abuser.

This is also why it’s incredibly frustrating to me that members of the BDSM Scene behave incredulously when it’s revealed that there are abusers among their midst. It’s not just that real abuse does happen in BDSM communities (just like everywhere else in our violence-addicted culture), although that’s certainly heartbreaking. It’s that the BDSM Scene is an institution whose most lauded characteristics actively attract abusers.

Need proof? Just contrast Saskia’s flippant wording for Matriarchy (“Males aren’t allowed to do much of anything at this event unless a woman gives them permission.”) with the kinds of experiences often endured by people suffering intimate partner violence (“control where you go or what you do”).

Of course, it’s important to distinguish between the BDSM Scene as an institution, what I’ve termed the BDSM Scene-State, and some given BDSM play activity itself. The short-sighted and, bluntly, stupid conflation of systemic versus individualistic perspectives, coupled with dramatic misunderstandings of what BDSM ethnographer Staci Newmahr calls “the erotic-violent dualism” is the source of the absurd defensiveness with which many BDSM Scenesters adamantly deny their unflattering participation in such an oppressive system. Moreover, the very fact that I’ve heard this silly “but we’re special” story in every single regional Scene I’ve travelled is, itself, proof of the structurally abusive dynamics to which I point.

Further, the distinction between individualistic and systemic perspectives is what enables BDSM to problematize many of the things that it does, consent being the most widely discussed. By way of example, the use of safewords mirrors the US Government’s Veterans Affairs office recommended use of “code words” to help prevent intimate partner violence:

Consider finding a code word to use as a distress signal to family members, children, and friends. Inform them in advance that if they hear you use the code word, they should get help right away.

While you can “safeword” during a scene, you can’t safeword The Scene. Just as rape culture is the institutionalization of (systemic) sexism, the BDSM Scene is the institutionalization of the practice of fetishizing oppression culture; it is, to use McKenzie Wark’s phrasing, an abstraction—a double of a double. It’s no surprise, then, that so many people who are “not white, heterosexual, class-privileged, cisgendered, conventionally attractive, able-bodied, etc. [have wondered why] the BDSM Scene just doesn’t work” for them.

The BDSM Scene needs to be resisted not because the BDSM Scene is “inherently bad,” but because it is a system. The simple exercise of tallying imagery at BDSM venues exposes this nicely.

Last night at The RACK Room, I counted 22 images of women to 2 images of men. The former were mostly framed pictures on the walls, while the latter were both attached to the refrigerator and partially obscured by the jumble of postcards and other odds and ends. One conversation I had with a party-going couple in attendance was particularly telling.

“Why do you think there are so many pictures of women and so few of men?” I asked.

“Well, that’s what sexy photos look like,” the man said. “To men, anyway,” he added.

“This is also a pro-domme house,” the woman offered, “so I think a lot of it has to do with the clientelle.”

“Oh,” I said, feigning surprise. ”So why are so many of the women in the photos tied up, then?” I asked them.

“Well, again, that’s sexy,” the man said.

“For what viewer, though?” I pressed him. He paused. “Are you saying submissive men want to see women tied up when they’re paying to be dominated by women?”

“Huh,” he said, “that does seem a little odd.”

Clearly, this had never occurred to him and, more to the point, it had never pained him before. That ignorance belies a privilege. It was and always is easy to point to the most well-known oppressions, like race, gender, class, and so on. And yet there are so many others so often overlooked and sometimes even more impactful.

As with all of us, Jeff and Saskia like to tout their inclusiveness, their sensitivity, their anti-oppressive intentions. But all of these things are constrained by the limits of what we can perceive. When I am feeling generous, I believe they remain exclusive of, insensitive to, and oppressive against what they don’t see not because they are bad people, but because they are invested in—and now beholden to—the system that grants them privileges they are not even aware they have. When I am feeling less generous, I believe they are also lazy, because, come on, they’re hosting a party where the thing they’re harping on is the way males “aren’t allowed to do much of anything…unless a woman gives them permission” and they haven’t even bothered to hang some pictures of men tied up on their walls? I mean, really?

So, while it’s (relatively) easy to point out the systemic sources and influences of something so blatantly obvious like that—I say as someone who’s been enormously hurt by how difficult it’s been to make people aware of these influences—it’s just as important, yet far more difficult, to point at even more “innocuous” or “individual” situations as being influenced by and contributing to systemic cultural indoctrination.

I don’t even know how to begin discussing some of these other, more innocuous things, which makes me rather timid. So, in lieu of having much else, I’ll share a relevant portion of an email I wrote to an organizer of the Myth parties in NYC some months ago:

I do think party spaces can offer a certain value and that they are important for sustaining a certain kind of social group. However, I strongly disagree with you that party or party-like spaces offer much if any value or opportunity for “the connection of those people with potential role models” for values of “those people” who are, as I stated earlier, more like me and less like you. You are therefore creating a Scene that serves you and yours. And more power to you. But I feel strongly that you ought recognize your argument comes fundamentally from a place that frankly presumes the privilege of comfort with sexuality and sexualization itself. And consider, please, that in a world which is overwhelmingly sex-negative, the people who have such comfort are fewer and farther between than you may be ready to acknowledge, because such people include even myself, and I like to think of myself (as I hope you know) as a strong champion of the sex-positive movement.

At the risk of sounding unpleasantly rough, let me put it to you bluntly: I do not feel safe nor comfortable in a room full of people who generally know one another if I know that there is a desire among them to fuck one another when I am not already familiar with them socially. I had to work really, really, really fucking hard to feel comfortable at your Halloween party. And while I am obviously capable and willing to do that work to acclimate to social environments, I do not believe you have any clue just how much energy I poured into starting conversations, meeting people, and—for lack of a less skeevy way to put this—”working the party” to find conversational entries to meeting those who I wanted to meet. *AND I WASN’T EVEN THERE FOR THE NAKED PARTS,* as evidenced by the fact that I intentionally chose to leave your party when I noticed it was growing more…touch-focused.

Now, it is *not* your *job* to make your Halloween party comfortable for me, but, in my opinion, if you think that simply getting a bunch of kind people in a room together who are all, as your document put it, “respectful, kind, consent- and privilege-aware, awesome people who are as committed as we are to a fun, sexy, and above all, safe and consensual party,” then you are woefully under-informed about the obstacles to creating what I view as an actively socially-inclusive atmosphere for sex or any other social activity really are. And that is going to hinder the success of your party space if you view it, as you seem to, as an activist endeavor.

I realize this is harsh and critical, but I trust you not only need no sugarcoating, but prefer our conversation that way. When you said “most of my activism is sex” shortly after we met, by which I took to mean “most of my activism involves having sex and creating (safer) sexualized spaces,” I was immediately put off. I want to be clear that I respect your activism greatly, even while it is not my activism. In fact, I wish you much luck. I would love to participate in your parties; I’d totally volunteer, given the chance and some future hypothetical desire to attend. But such party-centrism so thoroughly permeates sexuality subculture that I have increasingly come to see it as syphoning off focus and attention from other activities, such as a sorely-needed greater understanding of the diversity inherent in the ways different people *are able to connect,* socially.

I was never asked “Are you enjoying yourself at this party?” or “How are you doing right now?” when I was in your Halloween party. No one asked me to tell them about who I was. Few people even bothered to start conversing with me unless and until I proved my value as an interesting person by happening to say something that sparked interest in them; and I had to stand there and listen and *look* for those openings, which is NOT something I could have done without the 8+ years of experience I’ve had at specifically trying to figure out how to navigate those social spaces.

Parties may be great for people who are attending with a cadre of friends, lovers, or other pre-established social connections. But they are frankly often very, very poor experiences for people not yet connected to a social *group.*

Again, none of this is a slight on you or your Halloween party. It is simply a retelling of my experience in the hopes that by being brutally honest about my experience that night might make you aware of a whole different set of experiences, ones that may heretofore have been invisible to you. I am, after all, very practiced at hiding this personal difficulty for the sake of social ease; and those who are not as good at hiding this difficulty do not often last long in such spaces. Thus the chicken-and-egg that I expressed frustration with in my “Fuck The Community” post repeats again. And again. And again. :(

[…]

I hope you raise the bar on the standards with which party organizers organize parties. God knows that’s needed, because most parties are fucking awful, sexually-classist spaces that I routinely, actively and unapologetically lambaste. In my view, they deserve it.

But it’s still a party. And unless Myth is a space where the kind of *active inclusion* I described lacking from your Halloween party is practiced, I frankly don’t think it’ll amount to much beyond a new Scene, and I simply don’t find new Scenes worthy of much investment.

[…]

Yeah, [a party can be a valuable space for queer people to connect with each other]. And for some, it is. Great. For many, it’s not. For many, there is no more dreadful feeling than being in the center of a crowded room and still feeling lonely for reasons that the “party” is simply unable or, worse, unwilling, to address.

No, Myth wasn’t a place of “active inclusion,” but that is a post for another day. Very few parties are. I’ve only been to 1 in my whole life where it wasn’t “the host’s job” to say hello and ask how people were doing, where people simply came up to me to ask with genuine, empathetic interest, “How are you feeling?” Even most “intentional communities,” who often enjoy defining themselves with a rhetoric of openness, behave hypocritically in this regard; they are just a clique with a fancy name.

I don’t find fault with individuals for systemic abuses. It’s the system supporting the hypocritical behavior I hate, and so should you, because such systems intentionally enforce ignorance.

This three-part Venn diagram titled “The Role of Privilege...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:56:00 -0800

This three-part Venn diagram titled “The Role of Privilege in Polyamorous Relationship Structures” is part of Franklin Veaux’s incredible sexual informatics visualizations and shows the overlap of “Male Privilege,” “Couple Privilege,” and “Entitlement”:

At the intersection of male privilege and couple privilege is the one-penis policy (“OPP”), which is a manifestation of sexism that results in common relationship rules of the form “My partners can have other women, but not other men.”
At the intersection of couple privilege and entitlement is the polyamory veto, which greatly contributes to systemic oppressions against “secondaries” and is typically retroactively justified by those who have “primary relationships” (and thus couple privilege) with the callous notion that “our relationship always comes first.”
At the intersection of entitlement and male privilege is compulsory polygamy, including secular polygamous practice, and sounds like some shit-face saying things along the lines of, “I get to have a harem, but none of my women can have anyone else.”
At the intersection of all three of male privilege, couple privilege, and entitlement are unicorn hunters, also known as Hot Bi Babe chasers, which sounds like, “We’re looking for an attractive bisexual woman to move in with us and to be with both of us exclusively. She will be lucky to share in all the love we have to offer her!”

What is too often left unsaid is that these are systemic problems within the polyamory community that the community, as a community, is heavily invested in denying (with the notable exception of Franklin’s visualizations, of course). There is also relatively little work within or directed at the polyamory community challenging these tropes in a forceful way. Franklin’s own writings, such as his recent essay Polyamory: Some Thoughts on Rules, lays a great foundation that I’d love to see advocated far more strongly than I’ve seen it been, to date.

I’m currently musing on these and similar topics in preparation for Atlanta Poly Weekend 2012, where I’ll be giving the conference’s opening keynote. I’ve been fortunate enough to be granted that remarkable opportunity, and at a time in my life when I’m struggling to unpack the effect these things have had on my personally important relationships.

Please let me know if you have any experiences to share that relate to these topics, or come across additional material that has informed your thinking on the matter.

For some of my own thought pieces on polyamory, see:

(via Franklin Veaux’s Journal - Polyamory and Privilege)

"The purpose of having childcare [services available at KinkForAll events] isn’t primarily to..."

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 01:14:55 -0800

“

The purpose of having childcare [services available at KinkForAll events] isn’t primarily to address a power/access imbalance between adults and children…. Rather, it’s to address an imbalance in power/access between parents and non-parents.

It’s true that there are things children, especially very young children, need that they can only get from adults. But there’s an idea in our culture that the only adults who can provide for children are their own parents—non-parents supposedly have no responsibility to support the children in our communities unless we are biologically related to them. To which I say: Um, fuck that.

[I]t’s not fair on parents to be expected to do ALL the childcare[,] just because there’s childcare that needs to be done.

”

- KFADEN: Notes from planning meetings by Rebecca Crane via the KinkForAll Mailing List

See also:

Denver Anarchist Black Cross: Nurturing Liberation

Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: A Handbook for Radical Parenting Allies

Regeneración Childcare NYC: “child-raising as a form of resistance that builds radical communities and relationships”

zelamish: Gratuitous sappy post; my sweetheart, drinking...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 01:04:09 -0800

zelamish:

Gratuitous sappy post; my sweetheart, drinking horchata by the downtown food carts in Portland on my beloved TARDIS.

:) ♥

The BDSM Scene's Whiteness is Classism at Work Supporting Racism and Sexism

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:21:30 -0800

Earlier today, I got into a bit of a tiff in the comments at The Edge of Vanilla, which is the inimitable Tom Allen’s blog. What began as a calling out of some of the racist, sexist, and classist replies to Tracy Clark-Flory’s fantastic interview with anthropology professor Margot Weiss turned into a disagreement with Tom himself. It was at first distressing to me because Tom is one of the smartest and most diplomatic bloggers I know, so I was supremely disappointed when I encountered such straight-up bullshit in his comments, and I didn’t see him calling that out for what it was.

Further, I was really disappointed in Tom for apparently missing some very basic knowledge about ignorance—such as its dictionary definition—that I was almost certain he was already quite well-versed in. Thankfully, Tom’s diplomatic skill re-centered the discussion on the issues Weiss raises, which got me thinking about how to explain my own understanding of her work.

What follows is an excerpted cross-post of one of my comments in the thread:

[M]uch of Weiss’s work unpacks the effects of late-capitalist consumerism on BDSM sexuality; that’s among her work’s main themes. One of her articles I linked to earlier was expressly about this. In it, she writes that “marketers have tapped into the allure and exoticism of SM sexuality to sell an ever-widening array of products,” and this critique is, of course, relevant to most if not all subcultures that exist in societies employing late-capitalist economic models—most of the world, in other words.

I think the tech industry is arguably one of the most salient and illustrative examples of this. Its ever-increasing speed of innovation is a natural companion to the capitalistic impetus behind planned obsolescence.

The important take-away seems to me to be that mainstays of capitalistic practice have obvious parallels to The Scene, precisely because of the public BDSM Scene’s emphasis on things like “toys” and physical skill based classes. On that note, Weiss elaborates in her 2006 article, Working at Play. There, she writes:

As BDSM has become more mainstream, more organizationally focussed and more middle-class, practitioners work on their SM in self-conscious ways, mobilizing American discourses of self-improvement, actualization and education.

[…]

Thus, as I have been describing, the time, money and energy practitioners spend on their SM practice is a form of sociality. Combining consumption, community and pleasure, contemporary BDSM sexualities are a form of working at play[…].

What’s left unsaid in this excerpt but that the Salon.com article touches on is the way such socioeconomic divides segment the population; those who can and those who can not access such social work-play. That’s the very definition of classism and The BDSM Scene doesn’t just mirror that behavior, it actually intentionally amplifies that very trait in order to function as it desires—and that’s classist.

I find Weiss’s critique even deeper than this, though, because that same blockading of access to (“alternative,” or “BDSM”) sexuality helps maintain the oppressive “man box” for men of color. The constant barrage of cultural obstacles barricading a self-actualized expression of one’s sexuality is doubly true and—speaking as a white submissive man—I suspect unfathomably more painful for submissive men of color. From this angle, the support structures for both racism and sexism can be seen more clearly: classism and specifically capitalism doesn’t just inform, but actually intentionally supports both racism and sexism. As you, yourself, said:

The people who run the scene clubs don’t have a lot of motivation to change things because if the elitist, money-spending sceners are uncomfortable, then they might go elsewhere, and all of that cool dungeon equipment and play space will sit unused and empty, and more importantly, won’t put any money into the club owner’s pockets.

It is precisely this kyriarchical structure that Weiss pinpoints when she critiques the whiteness of the Scene. That’s why it’s no surprise that self-identified “privileged white women” would not enjoy being reminded of their unflattering participation in such an oppressive system. In fact, at the party I was at last weekend, I piped up about this fact and one white woman plainly said, “Yeah…I’ve been trying not to think about all that stuff this weekend.” So I was honest with her when I replied, “I like to make it difficult for people to forget about all that.”

Sometimes that means I make it difficult for people to uncritically enjoy the sex they have. I am more than okay with that. It is, in fact, an integral piece of my goal. Or, in my own crass language, many of these people are Puny Kings of their own Petty Hills; they behave like privileged shits.

Moreover, the monetary expense required to participate in the (semi-)public BDSM Scene in a way that is legitimized by The Scene’s “Powers That Be” is, as mentioned, one reason why it remains overwhelmingly white, but also a reason why The Scene remains overwhelmingly adultist. For more about that, I recommend reading Tynan Fox’s poignant piece at Leatherati.com called The Price of Admission.

I suspect that if you’re looking to make a difference, then you’ve got to approach things the way that generally works with other aspects of culture: convince people—the regular scene goers—that the things that you would like to see can be status enhancing and even trendier than what they already have.

This is where I think we fundamentally disagree, Tom. And that’s fine.

Your line of thinking seems to be that providing avenues of access to the privileges maintained by the systems of power described above is a way to “make a difference.” While making a difference is a noble goal, and one I share, accessing privileges through the system that blockades access to marginalized groups sounds a lot like the same old, tired liberal arguments that give us sweatshop-produced rainbow flags. You are, in other words, encouraging people to participate in behavior that is fundamentally callous towards the already-most-marginalized groups of people, rather than encouraging them to do the one thing every one of us could do right now to have an unstoppable power: refuse to participate.

And this is why I am a liberationist, and you seem to be an assimilationist. We don’t have to agree, but I need to understand your position (and I feel I do) and you need to examine your priorities (and I trust you will, if you’re not already doing so).

The discussion thread, still fresh on Tom’s blog, is a good one for you to hop into if you have any opinions or points to raise that I missed. There’s much more I want to say about this, but I’ve got lots to do tonight and I’ve already spent too much time arguing on the Internet.

For those of you in New York City, please consider coming to Conversio Virium’s upcoming free, open to the public meeting next Monday, January 23. I’ll be talking more about this sort of stuff (and a whole lot more) at my presentation there: “Who Else Wants More Play and Less Stress In the Dungeon?” (There’s also a FetLife event you can RSVP to, if you prefer.)

Over at the Edge of Vanilla, Tom Allen linked to Margot Weiss’s interview on Salon.com about...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 23:53:00 -0800

Over at the Edge of Vanilla, Tom Allen linked to Margot Weiss’s interview on Salon.com about her new book regarding the ways in which the BDSM Scene fails to live up to its own rhetoric of transgression. The comments on his blog, which is primarily read by chastity/orgasm denial enthusiasts, who are themselves a sub-niche of the sex blogging world related to but typically distinct from the BDSM Scene proper, prompted me to leave this ~~(as-yet-unpublished)~~ comment of my own:

Holy shit, Tom!

The comments on this post to date are the most disappointing and, frankly, largest pile of exactly the kind of privilege- and responsibility-denying bullshit that I’ve read about this, particularly MyKey’s ad-hominem ass hattery. And it’s no surprise to me that Peroxide’s ignorance is showing; Weiss’s scope was expressly defined as the public BDSM community, so his argument is not just derailing, it’s just fucking stupid.

Like I said on Twitter, if you’re surprised at any of this, you are sexist, racist, and/or classist, and it’s no wonder you do BDSM as an “escape.” It’s no wonder these commenters are jolted into ridiculous, defensive irrationality; THEY’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM. I’ll make no bones about making sure there are not going to be safe spaces for such behavior—those attitudes have got to end, and I’m going to end them one way or another. That’s a promise and a threat.

I’m incredibly disappointed in your blog readers, Tom. I’ll stick to the top half of your blog from now on. Disgusting.

This is particularly timely, considering the weekend I just had.

Sure enough, one of the previous commenters, a blogger named Scott who seems to write a pretty stereotypical Female-Led Relationship (FLR)/cuckoldry blog, left a reply to me, so I took the liberty of commenting again:

Hey Scott,

There was no need for personal attacks here when a measured rebuttal by you would have been more than sufficient.

screw you and your derailing bullshit.

I’ve never heard of you and have managed to get along just fine with that.

Obviously, it’s because you’ve never heard of me that informs why you’ve never heard me give “a measured rebuttal.” You didn’t bother to consider that possibility, though, did you?

So start by following some of the links I left in my previous comment (duh). And then, when you’ve exhausted yourself reading through those and what they link to, here are some more for you to start at:

The BDSM Scene is a recreation of “Pontus” - MaleSubmissionArt.com

Domism: Role Essentialism and Sexism Intersectionality in the BDSM Scene

Interview with Staci Newmahr, author of Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy

And also, next time you make a fool of yourself, don’t expect someone to take the time to link you to places where you can educate yourself, far less to be nice about it. I mean really, has anyone who commented on this post so far even read Weiss’s book (or at least any of her other published articles)? My own review copy hasn’t arrived yet. And really, Scott, your questioning of Weiss’s age (“perhaps she’s too young to recall how repressive American society used to be”) is bordering on blatant sexism and ageism, since it’s a direct implication that she doesn’t know her history. If you’d actually read her work you’d know better than this, which doesn’t even get to the point that the whole “but it’s better now than it used to be!” argument being used [as] an excuse to dismiss today’s oppressive behavior should make any ethical person want to vomit all over you, and I sincerely hope they do. It’s your job to educate yourself about derailing and oppressive behavior and then change it. Capisce?

That goes double for any commenters who’ve read this far and still have the knee-jerk urge to say something dismissive of the points Weiss has been raising.

No surprise such shit-covered entrails came from the FLR blogosphere.

For posterity, here’s the rebuttal Scott offered this time:

Hi maymay,

I rest my case. I’ve tried to be civil.

Best,

scott
Mrs. Kelly’s Playhouse

My own rebuttal is even simpler:

Civility is no measure of veracity, Scott. (Again, duh.)

UPDATE: A discussion of the issues of sexism, racism, and classism continued in my next post, but Scott found it necessary to keep showing off how ignorant he is. Here is the rest of our conversation.

Scott wrote back:

maymay,

I really didn’t want to get sucked back into this but it appears that you want to create some sort of change in “the scene.” In order to do that you need to change the way scene people think and feel. You have had an opportunity here which you have nearly squandered.

Why do you think that calling people names is advantageous to your cause? Even if you know something that others don’t, that doesn’t mean that they’re incapable of understanding what you know. How does it help you or your cause to make enemies so unnecessarily? You don’t know us and, just as Peroxide pointed out, if you used a minimum of diplomacy you might have won us over without any struggle at all. As it stands, by your frontal assault, you’ve not only pushed us away from you but disinclined us to focus on your cause.

Diplomacy: “Skill in handling affairs without arousing hostility.”

You might consider it. When it works, it keeps us from killing each other.”

Best,

scott
Mrs. Kelly’s Playhouse

I replied (but, several days later, Tom has yet to publish this reply):

You’re missing the point (again), Scott. I don’t want to “win you over” at all. I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep if you disappeared forever or got hit by a bus tomorrow. Let me make this perfectly clear: I don’t give a shit about you and your presumption that I would, or even that I should, and your continued totally fucking privileged bullshit berating hostile interactions is precisely why I find your behavior not merely personally revolting, but systemically oppressive. Can you understand that or do you need me to spell it out more succinctly for you?

Now, since I’ve made that as clear as I can possibly make it, I intend to avoid interacting with you directly, so you’ll not get another direct response from me. Period.

I do my best to always mean what I say and say what I mean. This is the end of our interactions. Scott may want the last word. In that event, you’ll probably be able to find it on the full comment thread over at Tom’s blog.

To those who hate me, I say hate me hard, for I have found a way to turn your disdain into my fuel....

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 23:57:56 -0800

To those who hate me, I say hate me hard, for I have found a way to turn your disdain into my fuel. If you want an enemy, I’ll give you a villain. I don’t need to be anyone’s hero; all I need to be is your nightmare.

This was a warning.

While I was at Arisia 2012, I went to the Sexual Harassment and...

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 15:44:00 -0800

While I was at Arisia 2012, I went to the Sexual Harassment and Assault in Fandom panel, at which I learned about the Back Up Project, an inter-convention initiative intended to create environments that are actively uncomfortable for abusers to exploit. This is particularly important in “geek” communities, where the Geek Social Fallacies are cultural enablers of assault. Here’s one of The Back Up Project’s handouts:

BACK UP

The Open Source Women Back Each Other Up Project
real world help for a real world problem

The Project aims to make help against harassment visibile and available, to create safer environments, to help women to support other women and men to challenge other men. We want sff, anime, comic, and other cons to be safer spaces for women.

I will break through your Somebody Else’s Problem invisibility field and come over and ask if you’re okay.

I will remember that you are in charge, and if you don’t want my help, I will go away. I will be there to help you in the future if you need it.

I will help you contact help: your friends, the event organizers, or police/security officers, if that is what you would like.

I will help you to the best of my ability if you’re being harassed or made to feel uncomfortable. Just let me know, even if you don’t know me.

I will not tell you that you must have been imagining things.

I will not say to you to go home, or go hide in your room, or just stay away from that guy.

I will not make you feel like your right to control over your own body is not a big deal.

http://www.backupproject.org/

There are also large buttons that you can wear to signify that you are an “active bystander,” someone who is willing to take on this “back up” role.

Some useful tips to help prevent sexual assault from the panel:

Watch people’s eyes: if someone’s in a conversation but not making eye contact with the person speaking to them, the person avoiding eye contact may be wanting an escape from the interaction. If they are looking down, they may either be very shy, or they may have given up finding an escape.
Tension can be seen in the jaw: people who are uncomfortable in social situations or are in distress carry tension that can often be seen by tight-lipped expressions, grinding of the jaw, and so forth.
Offer social outs: interject with a question such as “Do you know where [the pool/registration table/etc.] is?” If the person wants an out, they can say, “Oh, yes, let me show you.”
Check in using hand signals: Catch the eye of someone you think may be uncomfortable while standing behind the aggressor and flashing an “Ok?” hand signal, which looks like this:

Remember, as the panelists said, in order to address the issue of rape in society, we need to address the role of the rapists—the real rapists, not the storybook rapists. Most rapes (77 percent!) are perpetrated by people who the survivor knows. That means there are rapists at the large conventions you’re going to—no exceptions, no excuses.

Further, criminals deliberately perpetrate crimes at conventions because they know it can be more easily disguised. Think about it: how many people have you seen in masks and costumes at the last Sci-Fi/Fantasy convention you went to? Yeah…that.

Free Open Society: Dreaming of Compassion—Technology, Polyamory, and Social Justice (by maymay)

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:34:46 -0800

Last week, Ian Mclean launched an exciting new media project called The Free Open Society. In the spirit of Wikipedia, Anonymous, Occupy Wall Street, and many other collective intelligences that have successfully galvanized myriad individual actors, The Free Open Society (FOS) is aiming to, in its own words:

bring together a collective of new media journalists to curate, edit, and disseminate a concentration of news from disparate movements, paradigms, and projects related to social progress towards the Singularity, post-scarcity economy, and transhuman society as well as threats or challenges to that progress.

The project is currently seeking contributors to write and share various kinds of information, and I’d encourage you to join up if you’re interested.

I’m intrigued because Ian has a keen eye and is now focusing its lens on the often overlooked power of inter-community spaces. In the Preamble to the Free Open Society Manifesto, Ian wrote:

I envision people from the Singularity Movement educating their peers on the Zeitgeist Movement and the Zeitgeist Movement educating their peers on Anonymous and Occupy.

And so on.

This, I think, is the crucible of revolution.

At the level of individuals, many of these communities don’t know about or know little about the others. I’d like to equip the individuals with an education kit to allow people from different countries, different states, cities, ideologies, methodologies, and paradigms to educate one another on the system of activists, hacktivists, researchers, engineers, and artists currently at work trying to make a better tomorrow for everyone.

We need not only local action but global action if we are to achieve the kinds and quantities of change we need. Coordination between local groups, certainly, but also coordination between global groups and local groups. Both top-down and bottom-up approaches as each provides a kind of strength the other lacks.

In this declaration of intent, Ian is highlighting the need for us not to come together as a single community—a structure so many demagogues have abused in the past—but rather for us to come together as a community of communities. In some places, the FOS Manifesto echoes those such as Eric Hughes’s A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto, the Wayseer Manifesto, the Organization for a Free Society’s Manifesto, and more. In others, the FOS Manifesto is very particular about its intent to be a formal, inter-group alliance and to act specifically in support of other groups. In short, in Ian’s words:

Each movement holds a piece of the puzzle, and when every movement is brought together to contribute their piece, we can see the whole for what it is.

Or, in my own words, written earlier:

Divide and conquer is every oppression’s primary stratagem. Unity with diversity ought therefore be the root principle guiding every social justice movement. […]

I have learned of the diversity of intimacy from the asexuality movement, of the value of transforming the structure of relationships from the polyamory movement, of myriad physical beauties from the body-positivity movement. In Buddhism, the archetype of invincible equanimity is Guanyin, a compassionate deity whose thousand hands hold one instrument of liberation each. My pains are not an expression of self-pitying grievance. They are expressions of the struggle to fulfill an obligation to give to others the one instrument of liberation only I can forge, so that we all may use it. Each of Guanyin’s one thousand instruments of liberation has the power to heal one of the thousand cuts to sexual freedom.

Every one of you has such an instrument[…].

I plan on contributing to the FOS project where I can because it articulates the same sentiment I’ve been pouring my energy into pursuing. I’m proud to be an earlier contributor. A presentation on the intersection of technology, polyamory, and social justice activism I created for last year’s annual Public Anthropology Conference was added to the FOS project’s Tumblr archive. And I’m also pleased to see Ian and the other contributors taking my Creative Commons license seriously; as I say on my main website’s Advocacy blurb, “These [works] are free content for a free culture. Downloading and redistributing them, along with their source materials, is encouraged.”

You are not stealing from me when you quote, link to, or copy-and-paste my words into your own work, or contributing it to the works of others, such as the Free Open Society project. In fact, please, do so!

freeopensociety:

I want a new American Dream. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I think that we could build it, if we try together, because we live in an amazing moment in history.

As I bet any sexually vocal person will tell you, the Internet has fundamentally transformed our ability to communicate with one another. For example, before the Internet, if you were a gay teenager in bum-fuck nowhere, you were the only gay person in the world. Now, though, after the Internet, if you’re a gay teenager in bum-fuck nowhere, you’re one of millions of gay teenagers communicating online.

This is big. This is not merely the evolution of telecommunication technologies. This is a revolution.

The Internet is such a big deal that it’s actually a revolution of all kinds—media, governance, technology itself. But it’s also a second sexual revolution, and this one—our generation’s sexual revolution—traces its roots through the first. This is where just a bit of history comes in handily.

On May 9th, 1960, the first oral contraceptive was made available to the general public; “the Pill” sparked the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Like all revolutions, no one could predict the outcome at the outset. It sparked chaos; the sexual revolution precipitated the “sex wars” in the 1980s.

Also in the 1960s—in 1962 to be exact—Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, affectionately known as “Lick,” (not kidding) first proposed a global network of computers. The project was initially adopted by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an R&D branch of the US military.

As the slogan “Make Love, Not War” spread through public consciousness in the “free love” movement of the 60s, the Internet was being recognized as a tool of generic utility and in 1969 was launched as ARPANet. “Make love, not war” is, at least poetically, a physical parallel of Internet technology.

A specification for the ubiquitous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) was published in 1973—the same year as the Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion in America. In 1986, as the sex wars raged, the National Science Foundation funded NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps Internet backbone for expressly non-commercial, essentially academic purposes. The protocol for the World Wide Web, called the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), was developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, and, of course, eventually became the most widely used protocol on the public Internet.

In the same way as Gutenberg’s printing press was recognized as a revolution, bringing with it 150 years of chaos, so too is the Internet. Before the printing press, countries were kingdoms. The invention of the printing press around the year 1440 essentially signalled the start of the end of a feudal Western social order, culminating in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which brought forth a new system of political order to Europe and, with it, the modern concept of nation states. What might replace today’s countries in 150, or even just 50 years from now?

These histories highlight the intersections of and tensions between technology, culture, and policy. Moreover, hegemonic preconceptions are especially insidious when they make their way into technology. The same-sex marriage debate illustrates this when, for instance, clerks in many jurisdictions maintaining matrimony databases try to record a new marriage and the computer systems they use ask them “Which one’s the wife?” This unintentional antipathy to the diversity of human identities and relationships, which is literally encoded into society’s infrastructure, is perhaps the greatest silent threat to our species’ survival.

Schemes for a marriage database completely free of gender and sexuality assumptions do exist. Sam Hughes’s example permits any human to marry any other human any number of times and have any number of partners simultaneously. Now, if you tried to use a schema like his, you’d actually be forced to write tons of application layer logic to enforce the legal restrictions that are placed on marriage today; our technology already offers us capabilities that are beyond our society’s understanding of the social constructs and contracts many people have and are using right now.

The Dalai Lama once said, “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” But today, as environmentalist and author Paul Hawken observed, “goods seem to have become more important, and are treated better, than people.” Faced with the existential threat of this mounting tension, our species will be forced to shoulder the challenge that political advisor Jeremy Rifkin imagines we can accomplish: “extend our empathy to the entire human race as an extended family, and to our fellow creatures as part of our evolutionary family, and to the biosphere as our common community,” or perish.

Thus, the urgent question is: how do we do that? As it happens, today’s polyamory movement is uniquely situated at an ideological and technological intersection illuminating a possible answer. Polyamory’s key tenet—that a relationship involving more than two individuals is a good and valuable thing—is so powerful because it is so simple. To understand why, we can look to the Internet.

In his seminal work, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World, technology theorist Kevin Kelley wrote, “In the network economy, the more plentiful things become, the more valuable they become.” From a polyamorous perspective, one could say, “Love is not a scarce commodity,” or, even more generally, “the more, the merrier.”

As I see it, a poly activists’ core goal can be succinctly described as achieving equality in relationship choice. That is, polyamorous people recognize that the structure of a compulsorily monogamous relationship, in which one individual is connected to only one other individual, is limiting. Instead, we argue, many people may find more value by changing the structure such that one individual can be connected to more than one other individual.

This has some remarkable parallels to the way telecommunication technologies (like the Internet) work. In essence, polyamory does for relationships what digital telecommunication technologies have done for ideas. Here’s how veteran web designer John Waters explained it:

In the industrial economy, scarcity established value. Natural resources such as oil, gold, and diamonds were scarce and therefore considered valuable. […] Paul Romer and other theorists introduced the “New Growth Theory”. In this model, the principle of scarcity is turned upside down.

The new theory essentially divides the world into two productive inputs: “things” and “ideas”. Only one person at a time can use things such as a hammer, a telephone, a lawnmower, or a car. On the other hand, ideas can be used by many people simultaneously, i.e., recipes, blueprints, formulas, methodologies, and software. They can be used to rearrange things. They can be copied, shared, and connected, thereby leading to more ideas. “Economic growth,” Romer says, “arises from the discovery of new recipes and the transformation of things from low to high value configurations.”

Such “transformation of things from low to high value configurations” is what the polyamory movement does with regard to relationships. The most obvious limitation with the often-monogamous notion of “true love” is that it creates a scarcity model, and free distribution is anathema to maintaining scarcity. Polyamorous people understand that “free love” is not just a hippie slogan, it is a way to create real-world emotional value.

It is now our words, in the form of programming languages, that are driving the evolution of technology. The corpus of this technological literature changes our physical reality, offering us everything from hormone therapies to space shuttles to online social networks.

Meanwhile, those same social networks offer fertile soil where non-mainstream perspectives—and new languages—can take root. As Wired columnist Regina Lynn wrote, “Beyond the obvious benefits of online community, the language’s Internet-speed evolution continues to give polyamory a boost. When poly or poly-curious people stumble across the polyamorous lexicon, the discovery can help validate their worldview.”

The introduction of new language—both terms and techniques for communication itself—is a profound change. In the words of asexuality activist David Jay, “By finding new ways to talk about relationships we can greatly increase our options for forming them.” In addition to the value offered by transforming the topology of relationships, there is value in having a diversity of relationship types; even healthy monogamous people have strong friendship, co-worker, familial, and other kinds of social networks that look similar to polyamorous people’s more intimate networks.

In the early 19th century, American railways were a transportation infrastructure for commerce—a network of matter-moving devices. In the early 1990’s, the World Wide Web emerged as a general purpose infrastructure for communications—a network of idea-moving devices. Today, polyamorous and non-monogamous culture is a peer-to-peer infrastructure for the transmission of information about human relationships—a literal social network of compassion-moving devices.

This marriage of polyamorous culture with the Internet thereby accelerates the distribution of the Dalai Lama’s prophylactic prescription for humanity. Or, in other words, the success or failure of that quintessential American Dream, your “pursuit of happiness” is, at least in part, intertwined with others’ similar pursuits. As Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis observed:

“If I were always violent towards you or gave you misinformation, or made you sad, or infected you with deadly germs, you would cut the ties to me, and the network would disintegrate. So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks. Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things, like love and kindness and happiness and altruism and ideas. I think, in fact, that if we realized how valuable social networks are, we’d spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them, because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness. And what I think the world needs now is more connections.”

In the latter 20th Century, the American Dream grew up in a house with a white picket fenced porch, had a college education, and got a steady job. But today, the American Dream has increasingly been seen as a platitude veiling corporate greed. Founding director of Xavier University’s Center for the Study of the American Dream, Michael Ford, sums up the situation like this:

[T]o an astonishing degree [Americans] have lost confidence in the institutions traditionally seen as Dream guardians. […] Americans feel they are on their own but they haven’t lost the Dream. They have confidence in themselves, their families and their personal networks.

So perhaps adopting the polyamorous tenet, that goodness is inherent in social connectedness, is therefore not merely a social ideal, but also a blueprint for a 21st Century version of a re-imagined, re-invigorated American Dream.

(via maybemaimed.com)

"For reasons best described as kismet, the phone sex workers and I became good friends. We found each..."

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:41:00 -0800

“

For reasons best described as kismet, the phone sex workers and I became good friends. We found each other endlessly fascinating. They were intrigued by my odd history and by what I’d managed to make out of it. In turn, I was intrigued by the way they negotiated the minefields of ethics and personal integrity while maintaining a lifestyle that my other [lesbian separatist] research community considered unthinkable.

After a while, we sorted out two main threads of our mutual attraction. From my point of view, the more I observed phone sex the more I realized I was observing very practical applications of data compression. Usually sex involves as many of the senses as possible. Taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing—and, for all I know, short-range psychic interactions—all work together to heighten the erotic sense. Consciously or unconsciously phone sex workers translate all the modalities of experience into audible form. In doing so they have reinvented the art of radio drama, complete down to its sound effects, including the fact that some sounds were best represented by other improbable sounds that they resembled only in certain iconic ways. On the radio, for example, the soundmen (they were always literally men) represented fire by crumpling cellophane, because to the audience it sounded more like fire than holding a microphone to a real fire did.

The sex workers did similar stuff. I made a little mental model out of this: The sex workers took an extremely complex, highly detailed set of behaviors, translated them into a single sense modality, then further boiled them down to a series of highly compressed tokens. They then squirted those tokens down a voice-grade phone line. At the other end of the line the recipient of all this effort added boiling water, so to speak, and reconstituted the tokens into a fully detailed set of images and interactions in multiple sensory modes.

”

- Sex, Death, and Machinery, or How I Fell in Love with My Prosthesis by Allucquére Rosanne Stone

This is beautiful and genius.

The idea of phone sex as data compression is a fascinating one that itself hinges on our receptivity (and desire) to “seek multiplicity,” or apply certain behaviors in contexts other than their perceived origin. By (re-)applying an idea to a context foreign to it, one unlocks the possibility of creative synthesis. This is not merely accomplished by executing a new application, but rather by exposure to whole new origin stories. This processing seems an informational equivalent to what some call the “circle of life”; it is a cycle of ideas—what I call “idea sex.”

Thanks to this, I can now finally perceive parallels between the “literary telepathic non-magic of the Internet,” with its origin story as an evolution of inscription technologies, and the supposed linearity of time. When texts are arranged sequentially in chapters or compilations for the purpose of exposition, they have the capacity to move readers through multiple narratives. Sadly, most authors I am aware of have not utilized this capacity, perhaps because they had not yet developed a sense for the usefulness of parallel thought, something that hypertext and its corollary, hypertextual navigation, makes not simply evident, but blessedly and subversively obvious.

In effect, hypertextual literature is a three dimensional inscription that offers readers a non-linear path through time and experience—both the author’s and their own experiences. It is a medium that itself aids creative synthesis by virtue of the intentional (re-)application and, in many cases, (re-)appropriation of contexts. If more people understood how this changes thought—not merely thoughts but the very process of thinking—I think hyperlinks would not be so often overlooked.

See also: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, with which I largely disagree due to how Carr seems to (dis)miss the whole damn point of hyperlinks.

Right after learning that 53¢ out of every $1 USD an American...

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:24:00 -0800

Right after learning that 53¢ out of every $1 USD an American citizen pays in taxes goes to fund the US military, I found this poster a compelling, confronting image:

USA Has Killed (at least) 8 Million People In The Last 50 Years

USA: A Serial Group of Killers

1952-79: 70,000 Iranians killed.

1954: 120,000 Guatemalans killed.

1954-1975: 4,000,000 Vietnamese killed.

1965: 3,000 Dominican Republicans killed.

1965: 800,000 Indonesians killed.

1973: 30,000 Chileans killed.

1975: 250,000 East Timorese killed.

1970s: 1,000,000 Angolans killed.

1984: 30,000 Nicaraguans killed.

1980s: 80,000 El Salvadoreans killed.

1989: 8,000 Panamanians killed.

1980s: over 700,000 Libyans killed.

1991: over 1,000,000 Iraqis killed, including over 500,000 children.

1991-2009: hundreds of thousands of innocent people all over the globe.

(TRAP: The Real Art of Protest/Truth Vaguard)

I’d like to see citations for all these numbers but, even on first glance, I can tell they’re not far off, and in some cases may even be conservative estimates themselves.

For instance, that figure of 120,000 Guatemalans killed circa 1954? That’s undoubtedly a reference to the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état. For those whose knowledge of history comes from whitewashed Texas school books (which is, sadly, most American citizens), 1950’s Guatemalan history is a classic example of growing American imperialism at the urging of corporate lobbyists—a precursor to the outrage we’re seeing as part of Occupy Wall Street today.

In the 50’s, a US-based multinational corporation named United Fruit that traded primarily in bananas wouldn’t let 550,000 acres of unused land it “owned” in the Latin American country be returned to the land’s indigenous people. Even though Guatemala’s National Assembly was willing to pay United Fruit for their own land, the US corporation petulantly cried “communism” and went on to lobby US politicians to fund war-mongering in the name of “national security.” If that’s not a familiar refrain today, you’re living under a rock.

Moreover, this example of greedy war-mongering is by no means an isolated incident. In fact, America’s political atrocities on behalf of United Fruit were earlier versions of experiments in economic policies that came to fruition in Chile in the 1970’s. Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” (here’s a summary) is a fantastic exposition of these experiments in “disaster capitalism,” and, oh hey, notice item 6 on this list reads “30,000 Chileans killed.” That’s no coincidence.

The takeaway? Learn your country’s history—no, not the bullshit they “teach” you in school—and be prepared to feel very despondent about “The Land of the Free, and Home of the Brave” for a while. Don’t despair, though, because there’s a silver lining: you’ll be able to identify actual patriotism from the virulent colonialism those liars in your political party are calling “patriotism.” Better yet, you’ll be able to call those politicians out as liars—and I hope you do.

Oh sure, they’ll keep wrapping themselves up in the stars and stripes as they preach State-sanctioned terrorism. Meanwhile, you’ll feel saddled with a difficult, painful honesty. But at least when you fly a flag, it won’t be soaked in blood. Think about that next time you see someone dressed in red, white, and blue at a campaign rally.

What does this person look like now? A patriot, or a bully?

socialismartnature:

(Photo) The U.S.A. has killed at least 8 million people in the last 50 years.

People only call it genocide if it happens all at once …

"What is the personal genesis of self-empowerment? Are there invariable, atomic elements common among..."

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:02:54 -0800

“What is the personal genesis of self-empowerment? Are there invariable, atomic elements common among these experiences? If so, what is the most effective way to infuse the largest number of people with these positive experiences in a way that successfully engenders autonomous power for each given individual?”

- Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

May is asking some of the oh so right questions.

(via susanmernit)

Thanks, Susan. :)

Also, to my own readers, do check out Susan’s blog. She has some of the most eclectic mix of hyper-local activism, tech sector ingenuity, anti-oppression inspiration, and social justice theorizing that I ever had the good fortune of being included in.

Sometimes you’ve got to jump off cliffs and grow wings on...

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 01:33:58 -0800

Sometimes you’ve got to jump off cliffs and grow wings on the way down.

—Ray Bradbury

(via Jane Heinrichs: Courage - Grow wings on the way down)

Happy New Year 2012, everyone.

This year, I’m jumping off a cliff, and growing my wings on the way down. (Please read this big, personal announcement.)

high tolerance towards pain colon slash SLASH I used to have...

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 03:32:30 -0800

high tolerance towards pain colon slash SLASH

I used to have this on a shirt. Oh, how things change.

Feminism and the Disposable Male (by girlwriteswhat) I found...

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:24:00 -0800

Feminism and the Disposable Male (by girlwriteswhat)

I found this interesting. It problematizes the idea that “sexism=misogyny.” Can one go so far as to say, “It queers sexism?” That, even here, there is more diversity than one previously thought? I think so….

My one, initial critique of the entire piece is a glaringly obvious one: the orator’s repeated reference to “feminism” as a monolithic ideology. In point of fact, there are multiple feminisms and not all of them so callously disregard “male needs,” although I will concede that most mainstream (read: bumper-sticker) feminisms at least seem to do so quite readily.

Closer to home, I’d argue that “sex-positive feminism,” or at least those veins of the sex-positive movement embracing a queer social context that questions gender binarism and accepts the implicit challenge to see people complexly in its own discourse, does not so easily succumb to the dynamic described by “male disposability” as presented here. On the other hand, “sex-positive” feminism and many other feminisms still suffer from a binarism in which people’s salient hermeneutic characteristics are categorically defined, a tragedy in which no opportunity exists for the same thing—be it a personality trait, facet of sociosexual identity, or one’s way of thinking—to hold two “true” meanings simultaneously. What obscures this fact from, say, the BDSM community, is that the characteristic given primacy in determining a person’s “disposability”—how valued or devalued they are—is not gender, but rather role orientation: domism is not sexism, but the two lean on one another both inside and outside of BDSM Scene-State societies and subcultures. What I’m most personally interested in is the experiences of men when these two things intersect.

Anyway, a transcript of the video’s speech is below. Please note that the links in the text are my own additions intended to connect the pieces of the text with ideas that they spawned in my own mind as I was listening to them. They are probably not the author’s original intent and are not presented here with the intention of making them appear that way. Rather, the links are a hypertextual record of my own multi-threaded thought processes for later bisociative analysis. That being said, emphasis in the transcript reflects emphasis in the orator’s speech.

Not too long ago, I headed out with a feminist who had come into a male-safe space from a feminist blog, just to scoff at the idea of male disposability.

She she went there and basically said that the entire concept was a myth, that men’s lived experiences were completely wrong, that they were just a bunch of whiners who were complaining over nothing.

Yeah…. Anyhow, that got me thinking about the concept of male disposability and how that interacts with the feminist movement.

Male disposability’s been around since the dawn of time. And it’s based on one very, very straightforward dynamic: When it comes to the well being of others, they come first, men come last. This is just the way it has always been. Seats in lifeboats, being rescued from burning buildings, who gets to eat.

Really, society places men dead last, every time. And society expects men to place themselves dead last, every time.

* * *

Humans have always had a dynamic of “women and children first,” and that has not changed at all. The 93% workplace death gap has to be evidence of this, if only because nobody with any kind of importance or power is interested in changing it, at all.

In fact, I remember reading an article in the BC paper not long ago that described the increasing proportion of female injuries on the job as a huge problem. And in the insane thing was that the change reflected a decrease in male injuries rather than an increase in female ones. Men’s injuries on the job had gone down because the economic downturn had put so many men out of work in the resource sector that there just weren’t as many trees or pieces of heavy equipment falling on men as there had been before. Yet, this was framed as a huge problem for women that required immediate actions to solve.

It’s just crazy! It’s like, if men aren’t dying at work at twenty times the rate women, are we must be doing something wrong as a society.

* * *

Back when we were still living in caves, that attitude was necessary for human survival. Nature’s a really harsh mistress, especially when you think of all the animals that never, ever get to die of old age. Things were a lot different for humans through most of our history on this planet than they are now. Life was dangerous, human settlements were small, isolated from each other, and [so] one big disaster that took out a lot of women pretty much meant the end of the entire shebang for that group of people.

So, really, the level of importance that a human settlement placed on the wellbeing of women and children reflected, almost always, how successful that settlement was. And that can be expanded to encompass entire societies.

I keep hearing from the feminist camp that femaleness has always really been undervalued by society and that maleness is preferred, but I have always contended that it’s the exact opposite. The feminine is intrinsically and individually valuable, simply because females are the limiting factor in reproduction of any species. When it comes to producing babies, every woman counts, whereas (biologically), one very happy man could probably do the work of hundreds in that regard. So, the level of instinctive importance we humans place on the safety of provision of women and their children—it’s one of the main reasons why we’ve been able to be so successful that we come to really dominate this planet.

And while I will concede that this drive to keep women safe from all harm has often resulted in extreme limits being placed on women’s mobility, their agency, their power of decision to direct their own lives, all through history in many cultures, and in many cultures even today, I think it’s telling that those cultures tend to be the most backwards.

* * *

When you consider the restrictions placed on women in places like Afghanistan, and then you consider that, if we bomb them into the stone age, it would be progress, I think you can conclude the most successful societies had a really good balance between allowing women freedom and the ability to choose and direct their own paths in life, and the need to protect them and provide for them.

However, feminists will insist that these kinds of restrictions in those kinds of societies are the ultimate form of objectification. You lock up your possessions to make sure they will never be lost, or stolen, or harmed.

Honestly, if I were a guy on a battlefield, I might appreciate being objectified in that way. I think if I was going to be an object, I’d rather be a sexual one, or somebody’s prized possession, than an object that can simply be thrown in the trash or smashed into pieces in the service of somebody else’s purpose.

* * *

It was that last segment that struck me most strongly. Could there be a parallel between the idea of “male disposability” and the devaluation of male submission? It seems likely.

Back to the video:

Feminists also have a very simplistic idea that our willingness to absolve women of their crimes, slap them on their wrists, spare them punishment, comes from a deep disrespect society has for their personhood. Not seeing them as full human beings capable of looking after themselves, that we see them as children who don’t know any better. And, yeah, while there are parallels in our desire to protect women and children from not only their own poor decisions but the full consequences of their shitty behavior, it’s really not as simple as they try to make it out to be.

I mean, seriously, even today—even today, in 2011—we fully expect that, if it comes down to a man and a woman in a burning building and you can only save one, the expectation is that you choose the woman, every single time. So honestly, whose humanity are we placing above whose here? We’re not talking about going to work, we’re not talking about getting an education, we’re not talking about having freedom to decide what you want to be in life, and we’re not talking about getting to take Taekwondo. We’re talking seats and lifeboats here. The person in the lifeboat is going to survive no matter how capable or incapable they are of managing their own life, and the person who went down with the ship is going to die no matter how independent, self-sufficient, and awesome he is.

That’s the equation. One life, more valuable than another, and the woman wins every time.

So, honestly, is there any argument, anywhere, that women’s humanity has always been held in higher regard by society than men’s?

* * *

To be important to society, a woman merely has to be. A man has to do in order for his life to have any meaning to anyone other than himself.

Ah ha, here I begin to see the parallel: I was once asked what a sexually submissive man has to do to stand out from the throngs of other men a dominant woman could choose to spend her time with. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the question itself betrayed the problem. My answer was surely similarly unhelpful. In contrast, dominant women are valued simply by being present, albeit harshly tokenized.

Well…sexism may not be misogyny, but both of those things still sucks for everyone involved.

Okay, once again, back to the video:

I think it was Man, Woman, Myth who said, “Our society reduces men from human beings to human doings,” and I really think that’s an apt analogy. We measure a man’s worthiness to where the title of man, and therefore the title of human, through how useful he is either to society or to women. And one of the most useful things a man can do, even now, in the eyes of society is to put women and children before himself.

And while I think there’s plenty of argument that this attitude is at least partly innate, the way most survival traits are, even collective ones, if it starts in the chromosomes, we really do everything we can as a society to reinforce this dynamic. Studies have shown that even though baby boys tend to cry and fuss more than baby girls, parents are quicker to attend to or console a baby girl than they are a baby boy. Even just the level of acceptance of infant male circumcision in our culture when female genital mutilation was banned pretty much the first afternoon we all heard it existed, really says a lot about the differing expectations we have for males and females.

I mean, speaking as a mother, the last thing I would have ever wanted was to hear my child cry, especially when they’re at an age when they’re completely helpless, completely at the mercy of outside forces, and utterly dependent on the adults in their lives for every last thing. And yet, even knowing how painful that cut is, we expect baby boys—only days old, for fuck’s sake—to just suck that up.

* * *

And just think about what these very first interactions and experiences, these differences in how we nurture our babies depending on what gender they are, what this teaches them.

What do we teach baby girls when we attend to their crying so quickly? We teach them to ask for help because their needs are important. We teach them to let us know when they’re afraid or in pain because it’s important for us to know when they’re sick or in danger or hurt, so we can do something about it! We teach them that when they’re sad, or lonely, to summon comfort and comfort will be there. We teach them that they’re important, their needs and wellbeing, both emotional and physical, are important, just because.

And what are teaching baby boys when leave them to cry? We teach them there’s not much point in seeking help because it will be grudgingly given, if at all. We teach them that they should become self-contained in their ability to deal with emotions like fear, helplessness, loneliness, sadness, pain, distress. We teach them stoicism. We teach them to suck it up. We teach them that their fear and their pain are things that are best ignored. We teach them that their emotional and physical wellbeing are just not as important as other things.

I mean, given all of that, is it any wonder it’s like pulling teeth to get a man to go to the doctor when he’s sick‽

* * *

What we’re teaching that baby boy is all the things a man needs to know and feel and believe about himself if he’s going to stand in front of a cabin with a rifle while his wife and kids hide inside. We’re preparing him for the day he has to fix a bayonet to a rifle and charge a hill under enemy fire, and we’re preparing him to make a decision to resign himself to an icy fate while women and children escape in the lifeboats. We are really teaching him to internalize his own disposability.

And baby girls? By attending to her crying so quickly, by letting her know she’s inherently important to us, we’re preparing her for the day she has to think of her own safety first, even if it means the man she loves is left standing alone with a rifle in front of a cabin. We’re preparing her to take that seat in the lifeboat. We’re training her to not allow guilt or empathy or acknowledgment of a man’s humanity, or any sense that he might just maybe deserve it more, to convince her to give her seat to him, because for millennia, the human species absolutely depended on her feeling 100% entitled to that seat.

* * *

And that brings me to feminism.

You know, the patriarchy smashers, those righteous avengers of equality, dogged dismantlers of every single gender role. What exactly is feminism doing to dismantle this traditional role of the disposable male?

Feminism’s greatest victories have only reinforced in everyone that society still owes women provision, protection, help, and support, just because they’re women. In its collective dismissal and abandonment of male victims of domestic violence, it only reinforces in men that it’s pointless for them to ask for help because men’s needs are of no relevance, and their fear and pain don’t mean anything to anyone.

Feminism teaches us to put women’s needs at the forefront of every single issue, political or social, whether that issue is domestic violence law, sexual assault law, institutional sexism, social safety net, education funding, homeless shelters, government funding for shovel-ready jobs that didn’t stay shovel-ready once feminists got wind of them. Everywhere you look, everywhere you look, there are feminists pushing their way to the front of the line demanding women’s “fair share” of all of the goodies, the good stuff, the loot, the booty, the cookies. Even if women don’t need it, even if women don’t deserve it, and even if somebody else needs it and deserves it more.

And they get it, because we give it to them.

* * *

Feminism has done nothing but exploit this dynamic of the expectation on men to put everybody else before themselves, especially women. Women’s safety and support, women’s wellbeing and women’s emotional needs, always come first. This is the most stunning piece of society-wide manipulative psychology I think I have ever come across.

Feminism has been on the down-low with old-school chivalry right from the start. And they might seem like strange bedfellows for sure, but they’re not, because both concepts are built on a firm foundation of female self-interest.

* * *

We made our way as humans through a really harsh history, and we became the dominant force on this planet, and one of the reasons we were so successful is because we have consistently put women’s basic needs first. Their need for safety, support, and provision. It was in humanity’s best interest for women to be essentially self-interested, and for men to be essentially self-sacrificing.

But we don’t need that dynamic anymore.

I mean, our species is in no danger of extinction. I mean, we’re 7 billion people, clogging up the works here. What’s the worst that could happen if we all just collectively decided that men were no more disposable than women and women were no more valuable than men?

In fact, the greatest danger I see to us right now is that in our desperation to bend over and give women everything they want and everything that they say they need, we’ve unbalanced society to the point where we’re just in danger of seriously toppling over.

And really, the only difference I see between the traditional role and the new one for men, with respect to disposability, is that maleness—manhood—it used to be celebrated, it used to be admired, and it used to be rewarded, because it was really fucking necessary, and because the personal cost of it to individual men was so incredibly high. But now?

Now, we still expect men to put women first, and we still expect society to put women first, and we still expect men to not complain about coming in dead last every damn time. But men don’t even get our admiration anymore. All they get in return is to hear about what assholes they are. Is it any wonder they’re starting to get pissed off?

* * *

Anyhow, that’s not all I have to say about this subject, but it is all I have to say about it today since my kid is about to walk in the door home from school, so I am going to sign off and hopefully I will see you all again.

For now, I’m GirlWritesWhat, ciao.

When last I travelled to the United States’ East coast, I...

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:23:00 -0800

When last I travelled to the United States’ East coast, I met a fascinating group of people who all shared one body. Collectively, they introduced themselves as LB, short for the chosen name Loony Brain. They told me that they each use different gender pronouns, but for the sake of simplicity they all felt comfortable—for a number of reasons—with “they/them” language.

Loony Brain is part of a loose-knit network of people “advocat[ing] for Healthy Multiplicity awareness,” and against the idea that when multiple people share one body—commonly referred to as multiple personality disorder—they are automatically suffering from a pathology. When I met them, LB spoke eloquently and, to my mind, persuasively about the healthy differences between someone like me and someone like them. They are not one person, but a “system,” and as such their perspective on plurality was absolutely fascinating to me.

Loony Brain also authors numerous comics and ‘zines about Multiplicity distributed free on the Web, and that you can get in print for a several dollar donation. The strip above is from their “Questions” comic, answering a bunch of frequently-asked questions that they regularly get. In this strip, Sneak (one of the five people comprising LB), talks about their identity as an asexual person:

Question #3: “Would you like to date me?” (by Sneak)

Actually, nobody asks me this question, and I really wish they would! That way, I could say NO! Some people just seem to assume I do, and that they can touch me when I don’t really know them! Eeewww!

People did this even when I was twelve, which is, like, double the icky. Please don’t do that!

I only love people like friends, okay? That doesn’t mean I’m hard to get, it means NO! No dating! Okay?

Not all asexuals feel the way I do, but please don’t assume I want a romantic relationship. I’m happy the way I am! Just because I have family members who are older than me and sexual doesn’t make me interested!

So don’t do it please. It’s icky.

How many assumptions about human beings will we need to unpack to understand multis/plural systems?

My own tumult with the medical industry (yes, it’s an industry), was relatively smooth by some standards, yet I still feel scarred by a good deal of my interactions with it. As I wrote in 2008:

It’s been my mental illness, bipolar disorder, that has been the scapegoat and the whipping boy for much of [the] failings of my character, yet—ironically, in keeping with my character—I’ve always rejected the notion that such a simplistic, restricting explanation as mental illness is the full answer.

When I was twelve, I was struggling in school, and at home. There was one horrible month in which I had three debilitating panic attacks in as many weeks. My life was coming apart at the seams.

Like so many other young people in so much pain, I took to self-harm to stay alive. I burned my arms and palms with the household stove, partly an act of self-care, and partly an act of cultural defiance. My answer to “Don’t touch that! It’s hot,” was apparently “FUCK YOU! I’LL DO WHAT I WANT!”

It was then that I learned of Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, who selflessly and unknowingly saved my life. My mother (bless her fierce, if sometimes painful, love for me) took me to see a lecture of Dr. Jamison’s at Columbia University Presbyterian Hospital, as she had recently completed reading Dr. Jamison’s book, An Unquiet Mind. At that time in my life, it was unclear whether I would soon call this hospital my home; school officials and medical professionals alike were warning my parents that if things did not improve, I may have to be committed.

Dr. Jamison’s lecture was part medical talk and Q&A, but also partly her own personal story. I listened, enraptured, wide-eyed, as though I had just discovered the door to Narnia. Dr. Jamison was diagnosed with bipolar disorder herself, and, like me, almost lost far more than her career over it. She almost lost her life.

When the talk was over, my mother introduced us. Though it was only a brief moment, shaking her hand and seeing Dr. Jamison smile at me helped give me the courage to be interested enough in life to live. What I didn’t know that I needed more than any pill, more than any prescription, more than any chemical, was just to see someone else who had been dealt a similar-enough hand in life to me who also simply refused to compromise on their aspirations. I needed to see someone refuse to go down.

Around that same time, my father took me to an arcade called Lazer Park in Times Square. We sat in a corner in the back of the arcade, near the skee ball and the concession stand. We were eating greasy pizza.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said to him.

He paused. Then, he suggested something that would change my life forever. “Why not make a website? Write about this, and yourself.”

“I don’t know how,” I said.

“I’ll help,” he said.

That night, holding the image of Dr. Jamison speaking at that lecture hall in my mind as strongly as I could, I started writing. My father, good to his word, helped me. Not long after that, “Ups and Downs: A Personal Story of a Bipolar Teenager” was online. Back then, in the late 1990’s, when there was no Google, when people searched the Web—probably using Alta Vista—for “bipolar disorder,” guess who they found? Me.

I was not prepared for the influx of personal stories, queries, and pleas for help I received. ”Ups and Downs” remains archived on my personal website to this day. Partly, that’s for posterity. But also? It’s for helping to remind me that personal stories can help people bear the troubles and routines of the present.

Dr. Jamison doesn’t know who I am. But she saved my life simply by refusing to not live hers. I am eternally grateful to her for that.

You can’t know how many people’s lives you’re saving just by living your own. I don’t know if anyone’s even meant to. But I do know that if you can squeeze your suffering so hard that the scars in your psyche become gemstone jewelry on your skin, if you can turn your sadness into anger and your anger into action and your action into compassion, then you will become something far more important than just another agent of change. You will become your own reason to live.

And your life story itself will help others stay alive. As Mary Lou Kownacki once said, “there isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you’ve heard their story.” When you hurt out loud, 10 others are saved your pain. But when you hurt in isolation, 10 more will hurt 10 times worse than you.

I don’t know who you are, dear reader. I don’t think LB knows who you are either. We don’t need to. All we need to know is that we’re not gonna go down. We need to keep going. That, and encourage you to write.

Write about this, and yourself. We’ll help.

Sometimes wanting to kill yourself just means you don’t...

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:13:00 -0800

Sometimes wanting to kill yourself just means you don’t want to live the life you’re living.

You can change your life with that power.

What the hell, you were about to lose your whole life.

Why not instead lose your school, job, pretenses, fears, adherence to society’s standards, shame.

I have found some of my suicidal episodes to be strangely liberating in that way.

I wouldn’t take back any of what made me who I am today.

—The Icarus Project

Stay alive.

"[P]olitical motivated firings fit into a much broader pattern in American history that […] I call..."

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 03:22:00 -0800

“

[P]olitical motivated firings fit into a much broader pattern in American history that […] I call “Fear, American Style.” While people on the left and the right often focus on state repression—coercion and intimidation that comes from and is wielded by the government (politically driven prosecution and punishment, police violence, and the like)—the fact is that a great deal of political repression happens in civil society, outside the state. More specifically, in the workplace.

[…]

There’s a reason so much of American repression is executed not by the state but by the private sector: the government is subject to constitutional and legal restraints, however imperfect and patchy they may be. But an employer often is not.

[…]

On this blog, I’ve talked a lot about what I call […] “the private life of power”: the domination and control we experience in our personal lives at the hands of employers, spouses, and so on. But we should always recall that that private life of power is often wielded for overtly political purposes: not simply for the benefit of an employer but also for the sake of maintaining larger political orthodoxies and suppressing political heresies.

[…]

In the last few months, I’ve had a fair number of arguments with both libertarians and anarchists about the state. What neither crew seems to get is what our most acute observers have long understood about the American scene: however much coercive power the state wields–and it’s considerable—it’s not, in the end, where and how many, perhaps even most, people in the United States have historically experienced the raw end of politically repressive power. Even force and violence: just think of black slaves and their descendants, confronting slaveholders, overseers, slave catchers, Klansmen, chain gangs, and more; or women confronting the violence of their husbands and supervisors; or workers confronting the Pinkertons and other private armies of capital.

[…]

[T]he real bias one sees in mainstream reporting doesn’t come from one’s involvement in outside political activities. It comes from the desire to do one’s job in accordance with the strictures of one’s supervisors and peers, for fear that should you break ranks, you’ll be fired or somehow blackballed from the profession. Most of the time, that internal policeman will keep you in line. But should he fall asleep on the job, the company’s real police will there to toss you out on your ass. Again, Fear, American Style: the state, bound by the First Amendment, does nothing; editors do the job instead.

”

- This explains so much about the pandemic of elitism within some structureless communities, ironically including anarchist ones.

See also:

“How exactly do conservatives get the masses on-board in the first place?”

Are jobs obsolete?

Barney Frank Challenges [libertarian] George Will on Marijuana,...

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 05:49:00 -0800

Barney Frank Challenges [libertarian] George Will on Marijuana, Dec 18, 2011 (by euthman)

This is so fucking spot on.