I blog at Male Submission Art, host Kink On Tap, and support KinkForAll as much as I can, among more things.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm censored in some places. Make of that what you will. Follow me on Twitter.
Posts tagged: censorship
[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:
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Japanese pornography is so dominant here [in China] and they really promote the image of young innocent submissive female, and they appear to be underage. I interviewed a lot of guys who say that, yes, this is my primary fantasy. I want to see this submissive girl. What does it mean? I think it means that it gives the guy the sense of empowerment. They can handle the submissive girl. So in this fantasy world, they can deal with this kind of girl, but it doesn’t mean that they have this girl in real life but the fact that they have to probably deal with the quite powerful women around them. In Japan there are studies explaining that this fantasy is a reversal, a sense of weakness and incompetence that Japanese male was like spoiled by mothers also. In China it’s a little bit similar.
[…]
I found a lot of Chinese men and Chinese women have different aspirations…so does it have anything to do with the fact that they create the fantasy of easy submissive girl. Maybe it’s related. It’s a kind of reversal, that they can dream about submissive girl, but in reality, those Chinese men are rejected so badly by Chinese women, for instance on dating sites. The Chinese women are very demanding, and they publicize their requirements. And the Chinese men feel quite bad in a way. So I can see that Hong Kong and China is patriarchic. And I know that in reality, in the workplace, and at home, men have a lot of power. But that’s also just one way of investigating the reality. There’s also other realities where women have a lot of power as well.
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THE FOLLOWING IS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR PEOPLE WHO USE THE INTERNET.
Among the effects of Paul Graham’s famous remark, “The Web is turning writing into a conversation,” is that people are beginning to understand the ways in which “content,” such as blog posts, are a first-class manifestation of information. This is fundamentally important: since “information is the detachment of a resource from capital already detached from land,” as McKenzie Wark theorizes in A Hacker Manifesto, the value inherent in blog posts has little to do with their association with a particular blog, but rather the ideas they inspire in any given reader. In other words, where you read a blog post is not as important as the author’s ability to transfer their ideas to you.
One of the prerequisites necessary to transfer ideas from one individual to another is exposure; if you never read this blog post, there is no possibility that the idea I’m writing about will make it into your mind. As a result, I’m frequently flattered by requests from group blogging initiatives to join them. However, I am also perpetually confused by these requests.
My response to such requests is always the same: “My blog is expressly CC BY-NC-ND licensed, and offers full-text RSS feeds; if you ever see something you want to cross-post to your non-commercial blog, don’t ask me, just cross-post it, even in full, without alteration, and include a link back to the original post on my blog.” Cross-posting my content in this way is not just the Internet equivalent of “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” your cross-post also functions as a distributed backup copy and even a censorship circumvention node for me.
So, for the love of good and worthwhile ideas, do not hesitate to copy my content and republish it elsewhere. In fact, as long as you are careful not to decontextualize it and you include proper attribution, I’d far prefer you cross-posted my writing than asked me to write something similar from scratch. In the former, you’re rewarding my ideas (you are not stealing), and in the latter, you’re forcing me to reinvent wheels.
If the tables were turned, which would you prefer to be asked?
END OF TRANSMISSION.
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A friend linked me to “US National Science Foundation blocks Global Voices Advocacy website” by Ethan Zuckerman. In this post, Ethan discusses how the National Science Foundation (NSF), which (for those unfamiliar with the Internet’s history) in 1986 funded NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps backbone for academic purposes, essentially the first significant University computer internetwork, and thus the first Internet, blocked a website he and a number of other Internet freedom advocates write for:
[O]ne of the main functions of Global Voices Advocacy is to provide information to people in repressive nations so they can seek and publish information freely online.
After confirming from NSF officials that “the blockage is not in error,” Ethan states the almost too-obvious-to-be-deemed-important note:
[T]he National Science Foundation is spending taxpayer money to (ineffectively) prevent scientists from learning about a debate about “internet freedom” tools the US State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors are spending taxpayer money to support and promote, again using taxpayer money.
Is there a Federal irony department where I can lodge a complaint?
Thus: *FACEPALM.*
As if that wasn’t ludicrous enough, check out this explanation by JeffAlex in the comments:
This is an instance of unintended consequences rather than malevolent intent. The fact is, a few senior NSF employees got dinged a couple of years ago for viewing porn on their work computers. A Republican Senator took this up as an excuse to argue for budget cuts at NSF, the NSF got spooked, and NSF IT got the word that they should lock down the entire agency’s network. Obviously, there’s no point in trying to lock down a network unless you also try to lock down any access to sites that can tell you how to circumvent the lockdown. So, this is less about Internet or academic freedom than it is about simple inside-the-Beltway politics.
(Emphasis mine.) Others seem to agree. My own correspondence with government employees in other agencies also supports the explanation.
Yet again, porn is the scapegoat for political agendas. And not just the excuse, but the explicit rationale. A stupid one, to be sure, but unabashedly made, and—worse—unapologetically ceded.
Ethan’s snark is well deserved:
I’m pretty surprised to learn that the scientists at NSF are working in a filtered internet environment, and that the filtering is so aggressive that discussion of internet filtering and circumvention can’t be discussed. One wonders whether the State Department might consider offering some trainings for the National Science Foundation so that employees there can learn side by side with Chinese dissidents how to overcome filtering and learn about State Department sponsored research on internet filtering. Maybe we can sneak into the building with Tor on USB keys and clandestinely smuggle them to oppressed US scientists.
Well done, American bureaucrats. You self-defeating fucking morons.
This blog is my job. If it moves you, please help me keep doing this Work by sharing some of your food, shelter, or money. Thank you!
Leonore Tiefer
This blog is my job. If it moves you, please help me keep doing this Work by sharing some of your food, shelter, or money. Thank you!
My blog is often censored. In fact, personal blogs that deal with sexuality are the kind of content on the Internet that is most censored—personal blogs are more frequently censored than even political opposition party websites. Recently, I received a new report of censorship that is perhaps the most obvious example of how implementing Internet censorship is a form of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Someone from the US government’s Department of Health and Human Services Indian Health Service division sent me a screenshot of my blog being censored (shown above). This individual told me they work on STI prevention programs. They said they experience this blockpage quite a bit while at work, which is not a surprise considering the censored category is “sex” and they work on, y’know, reducing instances of sexually transmitted infections.
Censorship of this nature undermines the government’s own supposed goal. Sadly, however, bureaucratic attacks on freedom of information are not uncommon. For more on this issue, see, for example, the latter half of this transcript of a Sexploration with Monika segment regarding Internet censorship.
Moreover, note that the censored URL is actually my blog post discussing “anti-censorship best practices for sex-positive publishers.” Mmm, irony. Smells like un-American authoritarianism to me.
This blog is my job. If it moves you, please help me keep doing this Work by sharing some of your food, shelter, or money. Thank you!
Recently on Al Jazeera, an episode of Empire, titled Social networks, social revolution was aired. I found the following excerpts particularly insightful.
- Clay Shirky contends that social networks offered an urban environment information, like a metropolis for ideas. In his words, ”The densifying of the public sphere in advance of the revolution matters as much to whether or not an uprising turns into a revolution […] as the events on the ground.”
- Amy Goodman explains one of the failures of mass media. She says, ”In the united states, we don’t have State Media, but you have to ask, “In this country, if we had State Media, how would it be any different?” So, when you have the protests, February 15, 2003 before the war in Iraq, millions of people Rocked the Globe for Peace, right before the US attacked Iraq. And yet you get, at best, a major picture on the front page of the papers; you see millions of people screaming. Most people don’t identify with that. But when you hear someone talking—and when was the last time you’ve seen these grassroots activists brought into not the mainstream media, but the corporate media’s halls to explain themselves, to give a face and a name? It’s letting people speak for themselves instead of what we get on all of these networks: this small circle of pundits who know so little about so much explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong!”
I think there are parallels to draw, here. To what, exactly, I’ve yet to see. But they’re in there, somewhere. I’ll find ‘em.
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Transcript of my appearance on Sexploration with Monika this past Friday.
VOICEOVER: This is sex. Everyone gets what they want. This is Sexploration. Explore, play! This is Sexploration with Monika. Sex is proof that God loves us and wants us to have fun! Sexploration with Monika on FCCFreeRadio.com.
MONIKA: What a night tonight is going to be! We are having a “Sex Geek Potluck.” It’s basically like a conference, a very informal conference, of sex educators. We have filmmakers, we have sex workers, we have activists, we have people who are making some very sexy and interesting and strange sexual technology to do scientific experiments on orgasm. And it was the brainchild of sex educator Reid Mihalko of ReidAboutSex.com. Yay, and the crowd goes wild! Reid, Reid, Reid, Reid! Okay, so…
[FADE OUT]
…destabilizing hierarchy and creating community, which is precisely what the Sex Geek Potluck is all about!
[LAUGHTER]
REID MIHALKO: “Yes!” He said, rolling on his wheelchair, trying to catch the mic! Yeah, so, for the people tuning in right now, I’m trying to flip-camera some of this. I’ll be flip-camera-ing a lot of tonight, and I’m also your official wrangler.
MONIKA: You’re, yes.
[FADEOUT]
Well, I want to talk about maymay’s work, so maymay, if you will join the discussion. And then, we also have—okay, so who do we have after maymay? We have Priscilla of SexxBBoxx—oh, yes, Maggie, yes! Don’t forget about Maggie. Okay, so Maggie’s after maymay. So Maggie from PSIgasm.
MAYMAY: Usually she comes before me.
[LAUGHTER]
MONIKA: Oh, Maggie—Maggie Mayhem?
MAYMAY: Yeah. Usually it’s the other way around….
MONIKA: Awesome! She’s totally next door. Maggie Mayhem’s next door.
AUDIENCE: Oh, she’s next door?
MONIKA: Yeah, go get her. Go get your hummus and go get her. Okay, so she’s—Maggie Mayhem’s gonna talk about PSIgasm. So maymay is here from Kink On Tap.
MAYMAY: Hi!
MONIKA: Hi, maymay nice to see you again!
MAYMAY: So good to see you again!
MONIKA: Yeah!
MAYMAY: It’s been too long.
MONIKA: It has been too long. We talked a little bit about how you’re working with Megan Andelloux about remaking male submission.
MAYMAY: Well, I’m going to be doing a seminar there, at The Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health—I think it’s March 23rd? I hope I got that right—at The Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health, called “Remaking Male Submission” and what I’m going to be talking about is confronting sexism in the BDSM community—
MONIKA: Right!
MAYMAY: —and actually in BDSM porn and, sort of, the imagery, the iconography of BDSM, or SM imagery, where you see a dominatrix. The question really is, is that (with the leather and the whips) is that really much more or less, is that not a virgin-whore dichotomy or is that another sort of manifestation of it? Are we, sort of, infused by the mainstream culture?
MONIKA: Well, I think that we definitely have ideas about gender—
MAYMAY: Absolutely.
MONIKA: that infuse porn in kind of a—it can be really toxic.
MAYMAY: Yeah.
MONIKA: And not affirming of people’s full sexual expression.
MAYMAY: And yet we call it an “alternative” sexuality, right?
MONIKA: Right.
MAYMAY: So the question is, of course, “Alternative to what?” And then the question becomes, well we talk about an alternative to this, and then we have to gauge is it reactionary? So, when we talk about alternative sexuality, is it ‘a reaction to’? And I think that a lot of the formulations we see on SM iconography, especially when it comes to men who are submissive and women who are dominant, what we see is in fact a reification of a very misogynistic worldview. And that’s unfortunate. I, as a submissive man myself, definitely want to—
MONIKA: Okay! Back up a little bit. Okay, so how is a dominatrix and a male submissive misogynist? Or woman-hating?
MAYMAY: Right, well, it’s a good question, because, y’know, we—
MONIKA: ‘Cause ordinarily people would say, “Oh, that’s a very empowered woman!” Ba-da-da-da-da….
MAYMAY: Well they wouldn’t—well, “ordinarily” is an interesting adjective to use there. What I find so fascinating is that so much of the pornography that we look at of dominatrices, of men being submissive, sort of de-sexualizes the male persona in the imagery—
MONIKA: Oh, yeah!
MAYMAY: —and hyper-sexualizes the female persona.
MONIKA: Hmm.
MAYMAY: And what’s interesting about that is that, it’s very much like putting the woman on a pedestal. It’s just a different pedestal. It’s still a pedestal. So the question isn’t—
MONIKA: Rather than an objectified pedestal, it’s just a, sort of, like a…
MAYMAY: Well, you could argue—
MONIKA: It’s objectified in another way.
MAYMAY: Exactly. So, it’s not—
MONIKA: Like a power object.
MAYMAY: Right. So, we have this interesting notion of the “male gaze” or the “female gaze” in pornography and a lot of, sort of, counter-culture pornographers now are making “porn for women!” And the idea of porn for women is that the subject in the porn, the person holding the camera, is a woman, is a female. But in a lot of femdom porn, y’know, you don’t get that.
MONIKA: And what’s femdom porn? It’s when the—
MAYMAY: Female dominant.
MONIKA: —female dominant is….
MAYMAY: And let’s talk about just that phrasing.
MONIKA: Okay….
MAYMAY: “Femdom” porn often includes men who are being submissive and women who are being dominant, or includes women who are being submissive and women who are being dominant. The object in either of those situations is the female top. Right?
MONIKA: Right.
MAYMAY: The objectified persona there is the woman being dominant. So, as a submissive guy, I have to wonder whether or not that’s actually catering to—
MONIKA: Why don’t you get to be objectified?
MAYMAY: That’s my question! Hey! And I realize that’s a very—it’s hard be—it’s a very non-objectifying thing to say, “Please objectify me!”
[LAUGHTER]
MONIKA: You’re, like, asking for a voice.
MAYMAY: Suddenly you’ve got agency there, and it’s hard, especially for bottoms in the SM community.
MONIKA: Because you don’t really speak up as bottoms.
MAYMAY: We’re not taught agency. We’re taught how to be okay not having agency, as bottoms. That’s a really important thing. It’s really helpful and important to know that it’s also okay to not have agency in some situations.
MONIKA: Sure.
MAYMAY: Y’know, we deal with that in reality all the time. On the other hand, it’s also very, very, very empowering to be able to say as a bottom, “I’d like you to objectify me, please.”
MONIKA: Right.
MAYMAY: And you are claiming agency in that.
MONIKA: And it’s really nice to have a choice.
MAYMAY: Um, I would argue it’s a way to improve the world, to have a choice.
MONIKA: Yeah, totally.
MAYMAY: That’s a world-changing, sort of, sentiment.
MONIKA: Yeah, it’s destabilizing the hegemony and all that stuff.
MAYMAY: Precisely.
MONIKA: And the hierarchy and the dualism.
MAYMAY: Right. So that’s what the class is going to be about in March.
MONIKA: Cool.
MAYMAY: I’m looking forward to it. I’ve never taught at The CSPH before, but I’ve been there, and it’s a fantastic little spot.
MONIKA: And you are also a panelist on the Western Regional LBT—
MAYMAY: LGBTQIA, alphabet soup, conference.
MONIKA: —Conference—
MAYMAY: Yes, indeed.
MONIKA: —at UC Berkeley, with Maggie Mayhem!
MAYMAY: With Maggie, yeah! This is going to be a lot of fun. This is a BDSM 101 panel. So, Louie and William, who are a UC Berkeley alumn and a student there, they’re facilitating a panel with me, with Maggie, with a couple other people about just the beginnings of BDSM. It’s very much for newbies. We’re not gonna talk about pornography a whole bunch, we’re not gonna talk about gaze, it’s really gonna be about, y’know, how do you stay safe? What are the main theories of consent? What are the differences—
MONIKA: Oh, just the beginning.
MAYMAY: Very, very, very novice level stuff.
MONIKA: Sure, right.
MAYMAY: But we also—the hope is that we’ll also humanize a lot of what people see. Because everyone’s gonna come into that room, sort of, having an idea of what SM is.
MONIKA: Right.
MAYMAY: They’re gonna have an image in their head of a dominatrix. I just need to say “dominatrix” and you’ve instantly see, y’know—
MONIKA: Wapsshhhh! [whip noise]
MAYMAY: Exactly.
MONIKA: She’s wearing a black pencil skirt and it’s leather!
MAYMAY: And she’s got a corset on, and she’s in hells, y’know? Like, you instantly see that image. And that’s because—
MONIKA: And probably red lipstick.
MAYMAY: Probably red lipstick. Uh, interestingly enough, probably also a collar, and what does that say about our culture?
MONIKA: Right.
MAYMAY: That’s an interesting one, too. But, y’know, you instantly have this idea and that comes from, of course, mainstream culture. There’s a huge amount of fetishization in marketing, in, y’know—have you guys seen the Volkswagen commercial with the woman wielding the whip? They’re selling a car! And the way they’re doing it is she’s whipping the car!
MONIKA: Oh, interesting!
MAYMAY: I am not [kidding], like, literally whipping the car. She’s not whipping the car very well, but, she’s whipping the car.
MONIKA: Oh, really? She’s not whipping it well? That’s hilarious!
MAYMAY: No, her technique is a little bit—
MONIKA: She’s got bad technique!
MAYMAY: It’s…it can use some improvement.
MONIKA: [laughing] That’s awesome!
MAYMAY: I don’t want to speak too ill of her on the air, but, uh, it’s less than good.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
But the point is that everyone’s gonna come into that room having an idea of it. But the idea that we typically get from the marketers, who want to sell you a Volkswagen—as opposed to, y’know, wanting you to have a good time in bed because they care about you ‘cause they’re your partners—they don’t have the same…they don’t understand people who do those activities as full human beings. Like, I—I’m a programmer, y’know? I also spend my time at the park. And I like Vietnamese sandwiches. And these are things you don’t typically hear about—
MONIKA: [laughing] ‘Cause you live in the Tenderloin—
MAYMAY: ‘Cause I live in the Tenderloin, which is awesome.
MONIKA: —near the sandwich places.
MAYMAY: Oh, Saigon Sandwich?
MONIKA: I love that place.
MAYMAY: Big, big slices of carrot! Really good!
MONIKA: [laughing]
MAYMAY: So, but, we’re hoping also to humanize—
MONIKA: Right.
MAYMAY: —people who do SM—
MONIKA: Right.
MAYMAY: —in a way that we’re hoping will be a, sort of, gentle introduction for folks. And make it less scary! The subtitle of the talk—of the panel—is called “Kink Isn’t So Scary.”
MONIKA: Cool! And this is maymay from Kink On Tap. You can find him at KinkOnTap.com. We’ve been talking about his work remaking male submission and then, of course, this conference at UC Berkeley coming up.
MAYMAY: There’s also another conference, actually. If you are on the East coast, KinkForAll Providence 2 is happening on March 19th, so I’ll be there for that as well.
MONIKA: Oh, neat!
MAYMAY: Yeah. Megan might be there, too, in fact.
MONIKA: Oh, neat! Megan Andelloux, cool.
MAYMAY: And that’s at KinkForAll.org.
MONIKA: And Maggie Mayhem is also going to be on the Western Regional LGBTQIA Conference at UC Berkeley as a panelist. What are you looking forward to talking about?
MAGGIE: I am looking forward so much about this conference because I actually attended when I was an undergraduate and a freshman the LGBTQIA conference in 2004 and 2005. And I absolutely loved that experience. I had never had—I’d never seen so many queers in one place at one time.
[LAUGHTER]
MONIKA: Isn’t that nice? To be like, “Wow, I’m not even that freaky right now.”
MAGGIE: Oh my god! It was amazing! I would have the most amazing conversation of my life, followed by the most amazing conversation, of my life, followed by the most amazing conversation of my life, followed by the worst meal of my life—
[LAUGHTER]
—followed by a great conversation and then so many flirtations—
MONIKA: And then there’s that.
MAGGIE: —both physically and intellectually, and emotionally, because so many people were talking about so many things. I was flirting with ideas. And I loved that conference for that reason. It was intellectual foreplay. And then—
MONIKA: That’s what they call it. Y’know, intercourse?
MAGGIE: Yes!
MONIKA: Like, dialogue. Intercourse.
MAGGIE: Oh, yeah.
MAYMAY: There’s intercourse and discourse.
MONIKA: Right, exactly!
MAGGIE: Intercourse and discourse, yeah.
[FADEOUT]
It’s a lot of work. I hand it to the organizers.
MONIKA: But it’s really important to create—
MAGGIE: Oh, vital!
MONIKA: —queer community—
MAGGIE: Yes.
MONIKA: —and sex community, because I think so much of our stuff is in the closet and marginalized.
MAGGIE: Yes.
MONIKA: I mean, there’s so many people that are like, “Oh, no, you can’t say that on the radio. You can’t do that in Newspapers.” You know what I mean? All that stuff.
MAGGIE: “You can’t say that on television.”
MAYMAY: “You can’t print that on the Internet!”
MONIKA: Oh, the Internet, no!
MAYMAY: Absolutely, yeah! I’ve been in Providence, when I was actually visiting Megan one time previously, I went to the adult section of the Providence public library. The adult section—they had a kid’s section and an adult’s section—and I figured, y’know, I would be able to get to my blog specifically because I was going to the adult section. Turns out, nope, my blog was censored in the adult section in the public library.
MONIKA: Wow. In the adult section. That’s weird.
MAYMAY: Yeah.
MAGGIE: Censorship is really, really incredible. You start to feel important. I’m starting to notice that my website—
MAYMAY: [laughing] You start to feel important!
MAGGIE: —my website is being censored!
MONIKA: Yeah….
MAYMAY: Congratulations!
MAGGIE: Thank you!
MONIKA: You are getting a certain amount of dominant culture recognition when you’re censored.
MAGGIE: I have a dangerous ideologue.
MONIKA: That’s right.
MAGGIE: And it’s driving me crazy. I’ve never felt so powerful in my life until I was censored.
MAYMAY: That’s right.
MONIKA: It’s annoying, though, ‘cause now you’re like, “I’m reaching slightly less.”
MAGGIE: I actually got really interested in censorship on the Internet because I worked with the San Francisco homeless shelter system and I didn’t realize how severe sexual censorship was until I was doing an HIV training. And I was trying to facilitate not only HIV 101 skills but also research skills. I wanted to try to pass on information about how one evaluates a source. How do you determine how accurate it is? How inaccurate it is? Because, um, in the homeless system, you’re working with people who did not get to have a formal education in the same way. It’s always been interrupted. So, these are skills that many people take for granted. How do you evaluate a sexual source that is going to be, um, biologically, medically accurate?
Language is changing constantly. If you look at something, we’re using different terms, moving above and beyond. So I wanted to show that. And one of the questions I asked was—I did this with an Internet, um, “scavenger hunt,” I called it. I asked questions; I was trying to implant as many keywords one would search for with a question. I said, “I know you don’t have the answers to any of this. They’re very complex. I want you to go use Google, and tell me what you find.” And every single person in the shelter came back and said, “You set us up. You’re wasting our time. They’re calling me names. They’re very angry with me.”
And I’m thinking, “All right, patience. It’s a teaching moment. I’m teaching people how to use Google. It’s a harder skill to learn than you might think, especially if you’ve never had a computer.” Until I realized that the search—
MONIKA: It’s the library staff is, sort of, not letting the homeless people use the computers, or something?
MAGGIE: Well, there’s that problem. But in the shelters it’s so, so, so censored because they’re so afraid of pornography, that every sexual keyword is blocked. And the question I noticed that this was important for was—especially in an HIV regard—I asked, “What is PEP? And how do you get it in the city of San Francisco?”
MONIKA: Post-exposure…?
MAGGIE: Post-exposure prophylaxis.
[FADEOUT]
So, PEP is something I take seriously because it is preventing infections. It is making a change and people in a shelter system are in some of the highest risk demographic and they have some of the least resources.
MAYMAY: Were they able to find it? Were they able to answer the question that you asked?
MAGGIE: The entire search string was blocked.
MAYMAY: The search string?
MAGGIE: Literally, the search string—
MAYMAY: Oh my god.
MAGGIE: —came up with a window that said, “The firewall is preventing this search. It is an unacceptable adult search.” Because all of the pages about post-exposure prophylaxis included words like “anal sex.”
MONIKA: Right.
MAMYAY: God. See, but that’s what’s so interesting that I find about censorship, because it’s almost like the censorship itself will almost create new slang. Right?
MAGGIE: Correct.
MAYMAY: People who work around the censorship, socially speaking—kids do this! You know the, “Oh, is that what kids are calling it these days?” What that means—
MAGGIE: Yes!
MAYMAY: —that is a new—that is an evolution of language to avoid whether it be technical censorship on Google or whether it be, “Oh, I don’t want my parents to know that I’m talking about this.”
MAGGIE: “I don’t want my parents to know that I’m talking about this,” but also when you’re talking about health resources, we’ve banned the language that literally on Google will find the resources to prevent getting infection. But the porn—
MONIKA: Right, yeah.
MAGGIE: —that they’re so worried about, you can find it a million different ways.
MAYMAY: Yeah.
MAGGIE: So we’re not keeping the porn out, we’re keeping the good information out.
MONIKA: Not that there’s anything wrong with porn.
MAGGIE: No! There is nothing wrong with porn. I do porn!
MONIKA: There is nothing wrong with porn.
MAYMAY: So, that’s the thing. I think the moral of the story is, “Just say no to censorship, kids.”
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
MAGGIE: Say no to censorship!
MAYMAY: No to censorship. Just say no.
[LAUGHTER]
MONIKA: Okay, so I’d like to thank maymay from Kink On Tap, KinkOnTap.com.
MAYMAY: Thank you, Monika, this was awesome.
MONIKA: Yeah, thank you!
This blog is my job. If it moves you, please help me keep doing this Work by sharing some of your food, shelter, or money. Thank you!
Hi, my name’s maymay. I’m a sex blogger, and a sexual freedom activist, and as such I get censored online more than I think is fair. So I had some ideas about that and I wanted to share them with you.
So, here’s the premise. Let’s imagine you have something to say and you want to say it. No problem: you get a blog and you publish it. But this simple activity presumes that on the Internet, all content is created equal. Or, as ever so famously phrased, “In our world, al the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits.” Beautiful.
But is it really the case? If it were, non-controversial content like this would be pretty much the same as controversial content, perhaps of a political nature. Of course, we know that content is not all treated equally. And last week we saw a dramatic re-enactment of what that looks like.
Wikileaks faced all kinds of attacks. A lot of people were surprised that this kind of arbitrary censorship happened but to sex bloggers like me it was no surprise at all. In fact, the more sexually vocal you’ve been online, the more likely you are to have seen this coming. Here’s a few examples.
PayPal freezing WikiLeaks’ account came as no surprise to the folks who published the NYC Sex Blogger Calendar, who have had their PayPal account frozen and their funds seized not once, but twice, before they decided to ditch the service way back in 2008! And just last month, there was a big hoopla over Amazon’s initial defense of, then banning of a “Pedophile book” from their virtual shelves. Interestingly enough, Amazon initially said it wouldn’t pull the book because that would amount to censorship. Eventually, Amazon capitulated to public pressure and, of course, now the book is gone.
Amazon’s conflicting actions with regards to the pedophile book and Wikileaks should teach us 2 very important lessons. First, that censorship can be social just as much as as it can be technical. And secondly, that sexual speech will always be in the vanguard of anti-censorship efforts, and thus sexual speech will always be censorship’s initial–but never its last–casualty.
So here’s how we can frame the censorship versus free speech problem: On the Internet, even if your content may not be illegal, if you can’t find anyone to host it, link to it, or bill for it, it may as well be. To bring this back down to an Earthly example again, if Assange is a “terrorist,” not a journalist, then Galileo was a heretic, not a scientist, and that, since I’m a “sex” blogger discussing sexuality a lot online would make me a “pedophile.” Of course, we’re none of these things.
Nevertheless, we’ll all get called these things because, in the words of national security blogger Maximilian Forte, “The real ‘insurgency’ is the one being fought at home. To the state, every defiant citizen is a terrorist, in mind if not in practice.” So let’s look at how this is playing out in the Wikileaks case, just very briefly.
When governments started censoring Wikileaks, copies of the cables started popping up on mirror sites. At first, only a hundred or so. But within a week thousands. This happened for one very simple reason: the Internet is a copy machine. Since digital copying is so inexpensive, combating Internet censorship is as simple as copying and distributing the censored thing so censorship itself becomes increasingly expensive. But to do that, even today, you need supporters–you need humans.
As Dan Gillmor explains it, “WikiLeaks is the beneficiary, in this respect, of a wide swath of support from people who will make it part of their life’s mission to help prevent this particular instance of censorship from succeeding. How ready or able will they be to defend free speech every time it’s threatened in the future?” Okay, that’s great for Wikileaks, right? But what about me? What about you?
Right now, if I wanted to go publish something I had to say, I’d go to my own website, publish there, and then whatever I published would get pushed out to any number of other sites. Note that pushing the content to the other sites creates a copy.
But what if I first went to a remote site, published there, then had my own site pull that content back? There are already some ways to do this, so at first it didn’t seem like a big deal, but I wanted to see how far I could stretch this idea.
So I started experimenting at one of my own sites, KinkOnTap.com in this case. Here you see that a blog post I wrote actually came from Delicious.com, originally. I never had to go to my site to publish the post; I wrote it in Delicious and my site copied or “pulled” what I wrote from there.
Then I started experimenting with other tools all over the place. I wrote in Google Reader, copied over to Facebook, other feeds, and so on. I even enrolled other people to write so that no single user account was adding content into the copying machine.
The basic idea turned out pretty powerful: publishing first-class content elsewhere meant that my own website wasn’t the only place where my content was, which meant censoring my site itself wouldn’t do much good in terms of stopping my content from reaching others’ eyes. Moreover, censors would have to block a service provider, which means they’ll upset a whole lot of “legitimate” users who’ll want the block removed, too, regardless of their feelings about my content since they just want to use the service, for instance Delicious.
So that’s where I’m currently at with all of this. But if you’ll indulge my idealism for a moment, maybe the ideas herein can be amplified in the realm of the currently-theoretical.
Recall that being able to copy cheaply is what makes censorship expensive. Copying, in this model, is essentially an embodiment of the expression of free speech. Moreover copying is nonviolent, that is, it’s a creative, not a destructive, act. I think this is an important nuance because, as John F. Kennedy says: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
In other words, the cheaper you make it to create rather than destroy, and perhaps the more copying is inextricably tied to publishing, the more nonviolent social change will be. So, with that in mind, what if…?
What if in order to download a web page, you had to serve one? What if in order to have someone host your blog, you had to host someone else’s? See, the thing is, everyone cares devoutly about their own freedom of speech, but it’s the other guy’s that’s important. What if something like BitTorrent wasn’t for file swapping? What if it was a web server? To “say” (or publish) something, you’d have to let someone else “say” something, too. And would you gag your enemies if it meant gagging yourself?
So, these are just some ideas I’ve been playing around with. I made a space some months ago to brainstorm ideas like this, mostly myself right now. It’s at InternetNonviolence.org. I’d love it if you joined me there to talk about all this stuff. :)
Thanks very much.
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The more you tighten your grip, Lieberman…
…the more Wikileaks mirrors will slip through your fingers.