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: theory
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 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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
[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:
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!
[H]ow exactly do conservatives get the masses on-board in the first place? Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”, the preferred liberal Rosetta Stone to unlocking the right-wing brain, suggests that non-elite rightwingers simply get “tricked” into supporting conservative policies. The Big Scary GOP demolishes labor unions with one hand, but draws crosshairs on Tiller the Baby-killer with the other. It’s the only way Frank can explain such “irrationality.”
Robin calls bullshit on that. Non-elite conservatives—the Red State bubbas that have cursed this land for so long—reap very real material rewards, but they’re rewards which fly in the face of the cheery “every one’s good at heart” worldview of liberalism.
Conservatism offers them something Robin brilliantly calls “democratic feudalism.” In other words, dominion over your “lessers” in the private spheres of the workplace (middle-management tyrants) and the home (lockin’ down the wife and daughter’s ladyparts): “the most visible effort of the GOP since the 2010 midterm election has been to curtail the rights of employees and the rights of women.” This is the link between the Santorums and the Pauls of the world–one which Reason magazine, the Mises Institute and other appendages of the supposedly “anti culture-war” libertarian propaganda circuit work very hard to obscure.
Conscience of a Radical: Corey Robin’s “The Reactionary Mind” - By Connor Kilpatrick - The eXiled
See also:
- For more of the same: Corey Robin interviewed on RHRealtyCast.
- For a wonderful illustration of Robin’s key point in action: How to stump anti-choice activists with 1 question.
- For more background regarding the class implications of this argument: Antonio Negri.
- For understanding more about the ways in which resources are restricted to “lessers” and its relevance to intersectionality: A Framework for Understanding Poverty and Re-Caste-ing Alternative Sexuality: A Class Analysis of Social Status in the BDSM Scene.
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!
Working at Play: BDSM Sexuality in the San Francisco Bay Area, by Margot Weiss
See also:
(So, okay, if there is “labour” in BDSM, what is the labour? And, if we can pinpoint the labour, then what is capital?)
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!
I wrote an article about polyamory, examining the value of “literal social networks” using technology as a lens with which to understand it, titled “Non-monogamy: A Human Internet for Compassionate Payloads.” When I asked for feedback, I got some very interesting advice on the piece, including some critiques related to attitudinal concerns I thought were especially worth noting. Specifically, some felt the title would trigger “the ‘that makes me think of jizz’ effect” (since I used the word “payloads”), and others felt similarly about other parts of the piece; the article was, they argued, intended for publication in a sexuality ‘zine, after all.
While a valid and potentially constructive critique, certainly, it didn’t sit well with me. At first I didn’t know why. Then I realized what was bothering me, and I responded with the following comment, originally on Facebook:
[T]o those of you who are making the very valid argument that the title and the word “payloads” in it in particular will evoke thoughts of eroticization rather than non-erotic, intellectual connotation, see also Audacia Ray’s excellent piece a couple years ago on that very problem, “Taking the Erotic Out of Sexual Culture.” In essence, I am incredibly frustrated by the expectation that anything sex-related is going to be treated as an erotic aid. It makes things especially hard for me, as a theorist, to do just about anything without also incorporating an attitude [of] ORGASMS! FISTING! LIVE! NUDE! GIRLS! which, while there’s nothing “wrong” with any of those things per se, really isn’t the way I go about thinking or writing or presenting about sexuality-related topics. […]
The fact that sexuality is almost always eroticized even by sexuality culture people is a really, really big problem and one that negatively effects me every damned time I try to exist in sex-positive spheres. In other words, yes, some people really do read playboy (or MaleSubmissionArt.com, for instance) for the articles. I’m one of those people.
And to bring it all home on this article, I think part of me wants to leave the title as-is because it’s basically a big “Fuck you” to anyone who reads the title and expects it to be porn-y. Because really, that whole paradigm of expectations can suck my big, intellisexual cock.
This isn’t a new realization, but it is one I’m increasingly hearing echoed by others—a kind of socially-aware Baader-Meinhof phenomenon—as I drift from the topological center of The Scene towards its permeable edges. Ten months ago, I first articulated this frustration as follows:
I believe the world needs a place for sex to exist that is neither on one extreme or the other. That people’s sexual rights and sexual freedom—which I define as an equal-opportunity circumstance for everyone on Earth to live a sexually satisfied, self-actualized, and autonomous life—can not be realized when there is no middle ground between sex-as-stigma or sex-as-erotica.
There are so many places, many of which we’ve talked about on [Kink On Tap], where sex is derided or hated or sexualities are marginalized or made to feel less than worthy. And although they are constantly attacked, demonized and threatened with censorship, there are also so many places where sex and sexuality is celebrated. But I never felt welcome in those spaces either, those places of sexual celebration, because I am not comfortable with outright sexualization, and the means of celebration that these places—places I call the sex communities—commonly used (be they parties, or dressing up in fetish wear, or whatever) often felt just as alienating and often just as downright fucking sexist and classist and exclusionary as what they said they were breaking free from in the hegemonic overculture.
I was deeply, darkly depressed when I spoke that into a microphone. I was physically shaking, crushed by a kind of informational fog-of-war veiling the expressive knowledge I knew I wanted but didn’t know in what direction to explore in order to acquire it. Almost a year later—after I cried “mayday!” to the Internet, used “the fury of the righteous” to pull myself out of a nose-dive toward suicide, and barreled boldly into quite a number of new, intellectual frontiers—I guess it makes sense that I’d eventually come back around to this same frustration. It’s an obviously sociosexually-relevant, sociopolitical optimization problem with no good solution as yet.
For me, asexuality provides some of the greatest insight into the problem space because, as I learned at the Western Regionals LGBTQIA Conference last year, arguably its core critique of sex-positivity is that very same frustration:
GLBT “spaces are often very, very sex focused. […] All well & fine, but it leaves me feeling dry.” Okay to discuss sex, but ALWAYS? #WRC11
And:
Themes: asexuality often excluded, marginalized w/in ostensibly “inclusive” space. Key point: GLBT focus on sex act is alienating. #WRC11
That’s a site of strong feelings of kinship I have with asexual struggles. It’s why, when another commenter replying to my request for feedback on my article back in the Facebook thread said “then there’s folks like me who prefer/want to eroticize EVERYTHING (not just sexuality) and are tired of the assumption that this makes me sophmoric and/or unable to appreciate the theorist POV,” I went on a bit of a tear:
[R]espectfully, I sense that your eroticize-everything-POV *is* the majority view. Eroticization itself IS privileged. See also: asexuality. So, while I can empathize with your desire, frankly I have no sympathy for your position because it is actually really important to stop sexualizing goddamn fucking everything all the goddamn fucking time.
I look over these words and others time and again. Each time I do, my frustration with “sexualizing goddamn fucking everything all the goddamn fucking time” (often mocked with accusations of “prudery”) seems less and less petty, less “minor,” less like a niggling concern and more like a trunk leading to the root of something I cannot yet name. “[T]here is no middle ground between sex-as-stigma or sex-as-erotica”; “I am not comfortable with outright sexualization.”
I look around at “sex-positivity,” at supposed colleagues, friends, even lovers, and there is a nebulous, disquieting anxiety ever present in my interactions. I poke and prod at the thing, hoping it will respond in some predictable fashion, but tentatively because the poking and the prodding hurts me—I am poking at pieces of myself. Broken, bruised, jagged, jaded pieces.
I look over the ideological fence at the anti-porn activists, the sex-negative crusaders, at their cult-of-mono: monotheistic, monopolizing moralism. And, sometimes, when I look at them, I wonder why I am not standing there, with them. I know we have some of the same pains, they and I. To the sex-positive movement, I could be a devastating turncoat. But “beware the Dark Side. […I]f once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will….”
Back on Facebook, the conversation about “eroticizing everything” continued.
Them:
The reference [to asexuality] you provide does not describe how I feel about sexuality (in how they describe sexualized people). Rather, it provides a perfect example of exactly the perception (and assumptions) I am complaining about.
I do not deny there are a great many people who fit these descriptions (or so it appears to me anyway), and I freely recognize that I enjoy privilege. My point however is that there *are* some of us who eroticize [most] everything *without* putting sexuality on a pedestal.
Or, to put it another way: I eroticize everything not because sex is important, but because I classify sex at the same level as a bike ride or soaking in water - two other things I enjoy.
Me:
[T]his conversation is veering off-topic but I’ll entertain it in this thread for just a bit longer.
An anecdote may help here. A friend of mine was once invited to a birthday party. The birthday person was going to host it at their place, with a newly-acquired trampoline. “Come one, come all, and have fun on our trampoline!” Awesome. Except then came the second line of the invitation: “And wear something *sexy* cuz, wink wink, bounce-bounce on the trampoline!” Eye-fucking-roll. My friend chose not to attend the party in the end because it was clear that an environment of eroticization would be present. He didn’t tell the host to change the environment of their party, he just abstained; arguably the most ethical thing to do.
So, I’d argue that you are missing the point of my—and numerous other people’s, asexual identified or not—discomfort and frustration with prevailing eroticization if you are trying to make some claim to eroticization’s validity rather than its omnipresence. Or, put another way, it is not possible for eroticization to not be on a pedestal when it is present while jumping on a trampoline, AND riding a bike, AND soaking in water, while the reciprocal facts are not true. I.e., you are not riding a bike or soaking in water while you are on a trampoline, and thus those things are not omnipresent.
Them:
I agree. I’d be happy to continue the discussion, but I don’t want to hijack your post. I was simply sharing one of my triggers and was not attempting to argue against asexuality or the pervasiveness of sexuality and erotica in our culture.
I left it at that.
Meanwhile, I’m still on board the sex-positive bandwagon, but I also don’t think the simplistic dualism presented by “sex-positive versus sex-negative” discourse is any of accurate, helpful, or compassionate. Most of what I’ve seen in the sex-positive world leaves it infuriatingly blind to its own failings, and its purported contribution to societal values—valuable as, yes, “sex for every body” is—is still a deplorably crude hammer with which to treat relationships. I want the freedom to reject sex.
Unless “sex-positivity” also offers adherents the freedom to reject sex-positivity itself, it is a hypocritical ideology no better than the familiar sex-negativity it, itself, claims to reject. I have never felt more unwanted, coercive peer pressure to enjoy sexualization than when in sex-positive environments. And no matter how many times people tell me “it’s all individual choice,” when everyone around you is into it, the fact is there’s very little that’s individual about it.
So although I don’t feel like I have the linguistic precision to thrust a shim in between what this community says they do and what they actually do to look for the source of this dissonance, that’s what I’m trying to do. Because I believe that buried under layers of despicable shaming, the “anti-sex” radfems are on to something. And if we really want to serve “sex-positivity,” we better figure out what that is.
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!
I’m struggling to write an article to continue my contributions to SsexBbox, but I wanted to share this excerpt I feel good about:
This freedom to “connect” with whomever we choose—to exchange ideas with others regardless of geographic constraint—undeniably enriched our intellectual experiences. Is it so hard to imagine the same phenomenon will hold true when we exchange bodily fluids or emotional adventures?
Hopefully, I’ll actually get this piece written. For now, these couple of sentences (along with this tweet) can be a little teaser.
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!
A Femanist View: BDSM theory vs real life, F/m edition
I have no idea how I missed this fantastic post on the subject of entitlement culture manifested in the BDSM Scene and affecting “male bottom/female top” interactions.
See also:
- For a poetic counterpoint, see Give Me the Lion.
- For an independent take from a dominant woman’s perspective, see The Cost of Devaluing Male Submission: One Token.
- For my own retelling of other submissive men’s experiences who came before me, see Raging Chrysalis: The End of the Mute Submissive Masculine.
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!
As I have learned from geeks, structures of communication are not inevitable, given, or neutral; for any public to become a sovereign entity in contemporary technical societies, it must be recursive.
Although the social imaginary of a recursive public might sound suspiciously vicious and irrelevantly technical to some, it has, in fact, forked into other realms and other matters of concern. In the last six years alone, especially in the wake of the explosion of free and open-source software, recursive publics have found new constituencies—musicians, scientists, educators, filmmakers, collectors, activists, and architects. All of these groups have adopted not just the rhetoric of openness but also a particular attitude toward the conditions of possibility of openness—and the modes of manipulating them technically and legally—on and off the Internet.