Annabelle's Manifesto

On having been the "man" everyone warned me about

2010-05-02T19:07:00.003-05:00

It's been a couple months since Teen Vogue columnist Jessica Simmons wrote her much-linked post "Is Hooking Up Good for Girls?" about how casual sex apparently disempowers women, because apparently it leaves us pining in agony for men to commit to us. And Kate Harding has already written the great rebuttal:

...[I]f we teach all kids that there's a wide range of potentially healthy sexual and emotional relationships, and the only real trick (granted, it's a doozy) is finding partners who are enthusiastic about the same things you want, then there's room for a lot more people to pursue something personally satisfying at no one else's expense...

To which Rabbit White wisely added that the first step is (surprise!) honest communication. But as I'm reading these feminist defenses of casual sex, I'm also wondering: Where in this discussion are all the men who have romantically pined for the women who mostly wanted to get laid? They do, in fact, exist, and I can't possibly be the only straight cis woman who has struggled with the guilt of having dated them.

And before I write on behalf of Straight Cis Women Who Mostly Want to Get Laid, I should disclose that I haven't had much casual sex in the last five years. In my mid-twenties, I honestly prefer sex with a genuine emotional connection, with people who already know my quirks and vice versa, and I haven't felt the temptation or the energy for seducing casual partners. Filling out Heather Corinna's casual-sex survey was, for me, a nostalgic walk through memories from my late teens. At the time, I even considered myself a virgin, because I still oddly believed that oral sex "doesn't count."

I have very few regrets from the casual sex of my adolescence. I chose boys that also made me laugh, and also had "real" intelligent conversations with me either before or after the petting. I was on birth control and had access to condoms. I had fun.

But when I was seventeen, a seventeen-year-old boy that I'd known less than three weeks broke up with me for the reason that our relationship was "only sexual." I didn't have a good counterargument, because I barely knew him. But he had given me my first cunnilingus, outside on a starry night with a red dress hiked around my hips, and that memory still has its place in my mental portfolio for masturbation. When he called our relationship "only sexual," I knew that he was correct, but I was still frustrated and sad. I had just discovered the epic wonders of oral sex, and it would be a long time before I got to do it again.

Then, about two weeks before I moved to begin college, I started dating a man nine years older than myself. I had had a lonely summer, and for all my reservations about our age difference, he eased my loneliness. I told him on our first date that I was moving a couple weeks later, and we spent a night together exactly once: the night of September 10, 2001. The next morning, my entire country appeared to collapse before my eyes, and the week after that, I started my freshman year of college.

A month or two later, I got a love letter from the man saying that he missed me, and that when he thought of September 11, he thought of the pain of losing me. I was shocked and frankly terrified. When I think of of September 11, I mostly remember violent death, fear, and profound confusion. That fall, when I wasn't thinking about September 11, I was adjusting to starting college. I hadn't spared many thoughts at all for the guy I'd only been with for two weeks. His expression of romantic love made me think he was, at best, maudlin and naive, and, at worst, a stalker. I never wrote back or saw him again.

I didn't tell any of my friends about either of these men at the time, because I wasn't sure how to process them myself. For all the magazine advice on how to "trap" a man into emotional commitment, there was no script for how to handle men who were seeking emotional commitments that I couldn't give them. I felt guilty that I had gotten off on people who apparently wanted something else from me, and that despite my straight-cis-female identity, I had become the heartless man that everyone warned me to avoid. I would hear other girls complain about boys "only wanting one thing," and I would feel silently freakish and wonder the logistics of setting them up with my exes.

For all the formula-driven movies about teenage girls trying to win boys' hearts and teenage boys trying to get girls in bed, few have ever felt as truthful to me as Superbad. In that one, Michael Cera's character finally gets the girl in the bed, but her sloppy-drunken mimicry of mainstream porn is the antithesis of sexy, and he declines the offer before she vomits on the pillow beside him. Yes, the genders are reversed from stereotype, and the whole scene is fantastically, refreshingly accurate to my memory of high school sexuality.

Another response to Rachel Simmons that I recommend is Nona's post subtitled "What I Learned from My High School Diary." Because Nona did have the more "normal" straight-cis-girl experience of pining after lust-driven teenage boys, but she doesn't take Simmons's victim-stance, and she doesn't presume that her experience is universal. She and I had different experiences, but I still want to call out amen when she writes:

[D]o I regret the sex...? Hell No. It was one of the most exciting, fascinating, and interesting things about high school. Girls deserve to discover themselves sexually at their own pace, to be neither rushed into having sex nor shamed into not having it. They deserve to have their very own “This is bullshit” moments without wearing a chastity belt.

In hindsight, I'm still not proud of having ever hurt or pressured anyone, but I cut myself some slack for adolescent stupidity and experimentation.

The reality is that everyone desires different ratios of sex vs. love at different times of their lives and with different partners, and it doesn't always fall along the clear gender lines that Rachel Simmons believes that it does. The trick to making any sex emotionally satisfying is self-awareness and honesty about what we're looking for. It's a complicated puzzle, fraught with trial-and-error, but we can't figure it out by pretending that all men or all women want the same thing.

The Privilege of Not Defending Oneself

2010-04-18T20:02:00.003-05:00

I've lately felt an unfortunate pressure to defend polyamory again (with apologies to etymologists). I usually ignore the judgments of the uninformed, but then there's the friend of a friend who may or may not have been joking when she scoffed that she'd never let me near her boyfriend. And the polyamory-focused indie film that's actually all about how it's kooky and doomed. And the absolutist, all-caps-laced rant on the usually sex-positive The Stranger blog with profound metaphors like "such idiotic bullshit" and questions like, "Ever wonder why they all will fuck any damn thing that will hold still long enough?" So I could use my blog to paraphrase all the same points of The Ethical Slut, Opening Up, and Polyamory Weekly. But they're already making the crafted argument/explanation pretty well. My personal version is mostly sentimental: I love two people.

And I remember one poly-book-club meeting where someone suggested we all go around the table and tell everyone "why" we're poly. It irritated me, because it had nothing to do with the book we'd read, and do monogamous people ever go around a table explaining why they're monogamous? I politely listened to the chain of people paraphrasing The Ethical Slut, and I didn't disagree with any of it, except that I had to wonder about the poly community's talking-about-our-feelings fetish. When it got to me, I simply stated, "I'm in love with two people. I don't want to lie to either of them. ...That's it, really."

I was introduced to the concept of polyamory through the BDSM community, which I went looking for because I wanted to be spanked and I was tired of men reacting with concern for my "psychological issues." When I learned that people in the BDSM community don't necessarily assume monogamy, the alternative struck me too as strange and scary at first. But the individuals I was meeting all seemed intelligent and happy, so I figured it must work for some people, if not for me. (I think this is where most of my friends are now, which is fine.) I started occasionally listening to Polyamory Weekly because I respected Cunning Minx as a friend, and some part of me found the concept fascinating.

What made me actually want to try it was not any of my new poly friends' arguments. My epiphany came about a year and a half into dating the man I've since married, sitting on a porch with an old, dear friend, when I realized that I was deeply in love with both of them. Then polyamory suddenly made perfect sense. I'd learned in college that cheating behind people's backs really does destroy relationships, so I wasn't willing to do that again. But then there was this other ideology that said I could be with both of them without lying. Score! I went home and started the conversation with my now-husband by asking what our exact boundaries were, I bought my copy of The Ethical Slut and read it in one or two sittings, and then I lent it to my friend with the porch.

Three and a half years later, we've all learned more about how to actually make it work. There's been the occasional drama, as in any three-and-a-half-years of any relationship. But what I come back to is: I love my husband; I love my boyfriend. They have great taste in women, so I'm happy to have their other lovers in my life as acquaintances.

It's a strange concept for many, so I'm usually fine with questions. But there's a difference between questions of respectful curiosity and freak-gawking. And I may be more sensitive to implications that I'm crazy, that I'm evil, or that my relationships are doomed, because I get that kind of a lot.

In order to get more general acceptance, someone probably has to go back out to the mainstream and explain again and again and yet again that we're not crazy and we're not evil. So I'm relieved that Jenny Block appears to be doing that, even on FoxNews. I'm losing patience for doing it myself.

In Defense of Anonymity

2010-03-22T23:02:00.006-05:00

Betty Dodson has long been one of my sex-positive-feminist heroines. But then, because I do highly regard her opinions, her blog post yesterday entitled Going Public with Our Sexual Activity stung me. The post begins:

I'd like to get rid of all the "anon" sign-offs and cyber avatars. What is everyone afraid of? Why can't we all celebrate who we are sexually? What are the concerns people have about claiming their sex-lives under their own name? As long as we continue to hide who we are sexually, we will continue to be manipulated by our repressed conservative society that really hates, or I should say "fears" sex.

The moralists proudly shout their opinions from the roof tops while far too many in the sexual community sneak around under aliases...

And she has an excellent point. But then, my real name isn't Annabelle, and I won't be publishing it here, even if Betty Dodson does judge me for it.

The comments to her post already make the most obvious counter-points: We don't want to lose our jobs or to upset our families with information that really isn't our family's business. Which Betty Dodson brushes off in the comment to the end of her comments by paraphrasing, "Not being ostracized from the country club," but there are real-life consequences, and Google does increase their likelihood. Once something hits the internet, the author loses all control over who can find it.

But with the freedom of a pseudonym, we can write absolutely anything about our sex lives, with less risk that someone will find it through Google before we're ready to share with them. I have been influenced and inspired by any number of sex-writers whom I assume are using pseudonyms, from Violet Blue to Cunning Minx to Luna Grey and Catherine Liszt. Catherine Liszt came out under her real name Janet Hardy between publishing the first and second editions of The Ethical Slut, but the book is essentially the same. The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom does wonderful and pragmatic work for sexual liberation, even with a couple directors and staff listed as Mercury and Lolita Wolf, which I suspect isn't written on their driver's licenses.

If pseudonyms make us feel safer about making our sexual honesty available to the masses, isn't that better than censorship?

Besides the pseudonym, I maintain very different standards of sexual privacy on the internet vs. in the flesh. In the flesh, most of my friends and friends-of-friends are well-aware that I identify as kinky and have both a husband and a boyfriend. I stopped making the dramatic "coming-out" "confessions" a few years ago, and now just mention my "proclivities" as they happen to come up in conversation. At kink events, I usually use my real first name. So I don't feel like I'm "hiding" in my everyday life. The difference is Google.

All that being said, I deeply admire and thank the people who are all-the-way out under their real names, blazing the trail for the rest of us cowards.

In the meantime, we the anonymous are still helping them build the subculture that will create that change.

When Sex Negativity Is Kinda Hot

2010-03-07T15:04:00.002-06:00

I recently finished reading The Edge of the Bed: How Dirty Pictures Changed My Life by Lisa Palac, which I highly recommend, because I agree with almost everything she writes. The part especially sticking with me has been Chapter 6, in which she analyzes her kinky desires that don't just deny, but appropriate her anti-sex Catholic upbringing:

At its core, my Daddy fantasy isn't about my father but about Our Father Who Art in Heaven. I'd taken the dynamic of love and punishment, which terrorized me as a child and made me feel helpless -- kneeling down and sticking out my tongue to receive his body, whispering my most sinful transgressions in a dark confessional, doing penance to show my love -- and turned it into a powerful source of erotic pleasure. It wasn't a conscious decision, but then, sexual fantasies rarely are.

...Despite my fear that all of my intellectual processing would ruin by best sexual fantasy, it didn't. It's still a turn-on because I'm still struggling with the after-effects of Catholicism and I always will be.

Personally, unlike Palac, I was never raised with the idea of God as an old man who would send me to hell for sexual adventurousness. Instead, the messages that my sexual desires were wrong came from pop-psychology and a specific strain of feminism. Without God or hell, wanting men to dominate me sexually was a sin against Women's Liberation and a transgression against my Mental Health. My sex-negative clergy got most of its ideas from Andrea Dworkin. And I consciously rejected it years ago.

(Possible trigger warning.) Then, yesterday, for the first time, I lived out one of my earliest sexual fantasies: being locked in the trunk of a car. It was my own car, and I got in the trunk most willingly, and then my husband drove around while I pretended to be kidnapped. And it made me incredibly wet. Which triggered a voice in my head that I thought I'd finally vanquished in college: The feminist pop-psychologist asking, "What is wrong with me?! Seriously! Playing along with this misogynist, violent scenario can not be mentally healthy."

And then I actually thought of Lisa Palac, and the eroticism of appropriating the source of our shame. And then the same voice in my head twisted to conclude, as I suspect Andrea Dworkin would agree: "I'm really just a male-fantasy-brainwashed whore." Which is, in spite of myself, pretty hot, and made me hotter. (It's also irrational, since the game was my pubescent fantasy and not the idea of the man driving.)

I've worked hard to get over the idea that my sexual kinks signal a psychiatric problem (as the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders still suspects), and to get over the idea that they negate my Feminist Liberation. But in the meantime, before I get out of the car and go back to my everyday life with a living-wage salary and an equal say in household decisions, that feeling of deliberate transgression against political correctness and sanity leads to some awesomely empowering orgasms.

An Open Letter to Marie Claire

2010-02-28T00:24:00.002-06:00

Dear Marie Claire Magazine,

Thank you for publishing Pamela Druckerman's, "How I Planned a Menage à Trois." For all the shock-value usually attributed to sexual exploration, Druckerman's focus on negotiating with potential partners over coffee is greatly refreshing. She resists the sensationalist cliché that threesomes are invariably traumatizing and the opposite sensationalist cliché that threesomes are as glamorous as they look in porn, and instead reports her honest experience. More of this, please.

However, I'm frustrated how Druckerman glosses over, "In practice, I was shaken up," in the last couple sentences. Up until that point, planning and having her threesome feels either fun or banal, and then she's "struck by how emphatically [she] want[s] [her] husband." Why then suddenly shaken up? Is she feeling jealous? Or does she feel that N or her husband have violated any of her boundaries? Or is she shaken up by others' judgments that she's "supposed" to feel shaken up? Druckerman shows so much introspection up until that point, but as soon as she decides that actually her desires are "conservative" (and therefore "normal"?), she quits analyzing. That strikes me as lazy journalism.

And since Druckerman has decided against having any more threesomes in her life, why doesn't Marie Claire feature any of the many women who have more - and more positive - experiences to share about their threesomes? Or any of the many women who have initiated them, as opposed to acquiescing to a man's fantasy? I respect Druckerman's choices, but there's also a huge community of polyamorists and swingers who could provide better insight into why some women really, really like group sex.

Yours sincerely,
Annabelle River

PS If you too would like to write the editor of Marie Claire, the email address on their website is joannacoles at hearst dot com.

Graphic Sexual Horror and the Ambiguity of Consent

2010-02-16T23:52:00.005-06:00

Last Friday I too had the chance to see the documentary Graphic Sexual Horror at the Leather Archives and Museum. The film explores the story behind the now-defunct hardcore BDSM pornography website InSex.com, with an impressive lack (or mix) of glorification or condemnation. I'd like to thank Arvan for the detailed review he's already posted - as well as of course Barbara Bell and Anna Lorentzon for making the film, and Clarisse Thorn and the Leather Archives' Jennifer Tyburczy for hosting.

While Arvan's post touches on many fascinating aspects of InSex and of Graphic Sexual Horror, the one that I left the museum discussing was the ambiguity of consent. InSex's trademark was hyper-realistically torturing women to the very edge of their limits. The documentary asked whether these women had given fully-informed, empowered consent, and left the audience with the answer, "Some of them, some of the time." Which is almost more unsettling than "No," because it calls into question our sacred differentiations between sadomasochism and exploitation. But then, any strong differentiation has to withstand occasional questioning.

And when I make these ethical judgments, it's important for me to be aware how automatically and irrationally I judge pornography as "hot" vs. "squicking" by my own kinks. The clips of a women being dunked in water and gasping for breath make me want to masturbate, because personally I love playing with breath in my bath-tub. But the clips of women with eggplant-colored breasts from long-term tight bondage, while less dangerous, do not look fun by my own admittedly quirky standards.

That being said, Bell and Lorentzon captured moments and gathered interviews with both models who enjoyed performing for InSex and with models who believe that they were exploited.

I connected happily to what one voice-over called "the money shot": the masochist after she's been released from a spectacular scene, high on endorphins, giggling, enraptured by her own tenacity. It's a happy state I like to call subspace or "fuzzy." Regardless of whether their specific kinks are my specific kinks, and regardless of the appearance to the casual observer, some of us really are wired to find some kinds of physical pain euphoric.

But then came the story of model S4, who, like many of InSex's performers, came to the site not because she was a masochist but because she wanted the generous paycheck. S4 had told the site's owner, PD, that one of her hard limits was face-slapping. During a live feed to the internet, PD forgot and slapped S4's face while she was tied to a chair. Graphic Sexual Horror shows that moment and the minutes following, when S4 reacts first in shock: "You weren't supposed to do that." PD maintains his dominant persona and mocks her. He does ask if she wants to use her safe-word, but clearly implies that saying yes will make her a weakling. S4 does not use the safe-word, but emotionally collapses.

I understand that S4 and PD both felt the extra pressures of PD paying S4 large amounts of money and of thousands of viewers watching live on the internet. But I feel awfully strongly that S4 needed to be untied and sent home with someone she trusted. The line between adrenaline-happy pretending not to consent and actually not consenting had been crossed.

And I can even forgive honestly forgetting a limit. We play with dangerous things, and sometimes accidents happen. But then how we handle accidents counts for a lot. I too, actually, once slapped the face of a play partner for whom I hadn't realized face-slapping was a hard limit. We were grappling, and he's significantly larger than I am, so our negotiation had been more about my limits than his. His response in the moment was to say, "That was a hard limit," and acknowledge a lack of prior communication. I apologized, and then he took the next hour away from me, and then eventually we moved on. The accident didn't end our friendship or mutual respect, but it did end the scene. What feels traumatizing in InSex's slapping debacle is how long it continues past the point of shattered trust.

So, while some of the InSex shoots are undeniably hot to me, I think I'll be sticking to their lighter (and still extant) rival Kink.com as my primary source of kinky porn. Throughout the Leather Archives talk-back, Barbara Bell and the audience discussed Kink as less extreme and more theatrical than InSex - but I love that. Kink shares InSex's reoccurring theme of non-consent, but it has more winks to the audience that everyone's just pretending. There are the occasional archetypal costumes and "stories," and camera cuts from women struggling to the same women in highly intricate shibari ties. I don't condemn InSex, but I still prefer kinky porn that less often breaks the stage-combat rule against making me stop and worry if the actors are okay.

The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance

2010-01-31T22:31:00.005-06:00

The first time I heard the name Elna Baker was on the "Matchmakers" episode of This American Life radio show. Her segment on working for FAO Schwartz is well worth listening to: The beginning makes me laugh hard, and then it packs a sucker-punch of commentary on American racism and classism. Touched by Elna Baker's humor and poignancy, I went looking for her personal website, which has clips of her telling stories. Watching her first video clip, then, I was surprised to learn that Elna Baker is also a practicing Mormon committed to virginity-until-marriage. As she says of her dating experience for the laugh-line, "As a Mormon, I don't believe in having sex, and eventually, as a guy, he didn't believe in that. So atheists do have beliefs."

And I have to confess my gut-level reaction to Mormon abstinence. Because most of my prior awareness of Mormons comes from their financial and vocal support for Proposition 8, which stripped Californian gays and lesbians of civil rights, and their practice of security-detention for gay men who kiss on the cheek. My awareness of abstinence-only propaganda is that it's objectively ineffective, in addition to intentionally spreading misinformation, sexism, fear, shame, and homophobia. There are "purity balls" that promote fathers' ownership of their daughters' sexuality, and "virginity pledgers" with comparable STD and pregnancy rates to their more honest peers. I highly recommend Feministing's Jessica Valenti's eloquent writing on female disempowerment by "the virginity fetish" and defense of pre-marital sex.

Personally, I discovered worlds of knowledge about my own sexuality between the time I lost my virginity and the time I got married. If I had bought into abstinence propaganda, I could have naively married someone who deprecated my kinks, and I would have been miserable for life.

But Elna Baker stayed in my head, because I couldn't write her off as a zealot. Her stories still make me laugh, and the majority of her stories that have little or nothing to do with abstinence still resonate with me. So I read a copy of her recently published memoir, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, with the teaser on book-flap that her beliefs were challenged by falling in love with an atheist. I was curious.

And in the end, I still empathize more strongly with the atheist ex-boyfriend who refused to give up sex than I do with Elna Baker. Gender-roles reversed, I too once had a boyfriend squirm at the notion that having sex with me was "disrespectful" or antithetical to "real love," and it made me feel genuinely, sickeningly dirty. (Unlike now when my lovers call me a dirty whore because I've told them that that turns me on.) But empathizing with the atheist over Elna was okay for my enjoyment of the book, because Elna empathized with him too.

Because in a refreshing break from the more vocal enforced-virginity culture, Elna Baker isn't interested in judging anyone else's sexuality or preaching scare-tactics. She discusses abstaining from sex as a deeply personal choice, and confesses her occasional doubts, awkwardness, and heartbreaks. She finds joy in sexy lingerie, tells funny stories about giant vaginas, and makes fun of Mormon absolutists. She's self-aware and autonomous in a way that distinctly separates her from, say, Jordin Sparks, who has explained her abstinence, "Not everybody – guy or girl – wants to be a slut," as if there were exactly two options.

So I remain grateful for the memories and lessons of my eight years of premarital sex, and will fight for comprehensive, shame-free sex education. But I appreciate Elna Baker for challenging my preconceived notions of adult abstinence-pledgers.

A Plea for Truth in Advertising

2010-01-24T22:58:00.000-06:00

In my last post, I mentioned my ongoing admiration of The Daily Show for its consistent insight. But there is one part of late-evening Comedy Central that frustrates me to no end, and that is the parade of commercials featuring straight men lying to women. The men selling Twix candy bars gets women to sleep with them by denouncing books they enjoy or lying about having been burglarized; the men selling Jim Beam whiskey get women's interest with rented puppies. The straight men in the Captain Morgan rum ad and The Hangover trailers lie to their significant others about drinking and parties, because apparently women Never Let Them Have Any Fun.

And with so many better-organized feminists campaigning against "objectification" and "exploitation," I have to explain that I'm generally not bothered by advertising that links products to sexy, scantily-clad women. It's not clever advertising, but I like looking at sexy, scantily-clad women too. When I go to dance clubs or the dungeon, I often intentionally dress scantily and hope that people think I look sexy. I don't believe that finding someone physically attractive must be mutually exclusive to respecting their humanity.

What infuriates me is the repeated message that men have to trick women into sex with them. In addition to the ethical problem, it paints an awfully bleak picture of male heterosexuality: doomed to want sex with anti-sex, no-fun people like women.

The message is even clearer on Twix's main website, which has "interactive" versions of the commercials. The boy in the commercial invites the girl back to his apartment, she reacts, "What kind of girl do you think I am?!" and the viewer has a choice between "Be shallow" or "Be deep." The "shallow" option turns out to be telling the girl that he thinks she's sexy - the truth - to which she slaps him and stomps away. Then the video rewinds and gives the viewer another chance to make the "right" choice, which is to "be deep" and lie to her. Further on, clicking "Be honest" ("I just said all that stuff so I could get to know you a little better") will actually get you tased before the girl stomps away again. (How this translates to "Buy our candy bars" eludes me.)

So with my credentials of actually being a straight woman, I want to explain to the ad execs that such trickery is both insulting and really not necessary. Most of my sexual relationships started with telling each other something "shallow" or "honest" like, "I think you're sexy," or "I would like to get to know you better." Directness is refreshing. The gullible woman who pulls a taser on honesty does not speak for my gender.

I have a similar reaction to the woman in The Hangover spitting through the trailer: "Boys and their bachelor parties: It's gross." For the record, my husband and I had a joint bachelor/bachelorette party, and it wasn't our wildest party because we were both exhausted from wedding planning. But almost six months into marriage, we both still enjoy our whiskey and kinky play with other people. I don't binge-drink or party as hard or as often as I did, say, in college, but I did have a wonderful drunken Halloween grinding with a guy whose name I never got. Women can be hedonists, too.

So I haven't seen the movie, but I think the hero of The Hangover should get out of his lie-necessitating imminent marriage as soon as possible and find himself a woman who will go on the wacky hedonistic adventures with him, as an equal. We're out there.

And we're a lot more likely to sleep with you if you're honest with us.

Re-Defining Marriage, or Love for The Daily Show

2010-01-20T23:39:00.000-06:00

I realize that I'm a couple days late by blogging standards, but I still want to join Anita Wagner, Alan, and Loving More in cheering for the polyamorous threesome on The Daily Show last Monday:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

No Gay Out

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

The poly folks come in at 3:10, but the whole clip is a good analysis of the marriage debates.

As the comments on Poly in the News agree (including one from George and Joy Reagan, the couple featured), The Daily Show did an impressive job of showing the poly interviewees as articulate, well-adjusted, sexy people, and getting its laughs at the expense of professional-comedian Jason Jones and his mock-sensationalism instead.

The segment also speaks well to trying to define my own heterosexual, polyamorous marriage, especially in its context of a fight for gay equality. The double standard is obvious and absurd: Heterosexuals already enjoy all kinds of "non-traditional" marriages, and yet the "traditional-marriage" lobby hasn't mounted any serious political campaigns against us.

In order to get my husband's and my marriage recognized by our families and by religious institutions, we did swallow a certain amount of pretense of "traditional" monogamy. Our vows promised, "I will be honest to you and trusting of you," and not fidelity; but we still smiled politely and silently when our parents' friends commented about us being "off the market." I stifled my laugh when our Catholic officiant asked me, "Do you believe that he will be as faithful to you as you are to him?" and simply answered, "Yes!"

But for all our half-lies to family and clergy, the U.S. government does not care. The county clerk who wrote our marriage license asked for our birthdays, our social security numbers, our birthplaces, and our professions. They did not ask our stance on adultery.

For that matter, we weren't legally required to hide the truth from our families or religious institutions either. We made the decision to avoid unnecessary drama, and we believe that full honesty with our lovers and closer friends is sufficient for our own consciences. But if we wanted to live more openly, we certainly could have told everyone we know, uninvited any disapprovers, gotten a civil judge or a Unitarian or a temporarily-ordained friend to officiate, and still had our legal wedding. The county clerks processing our name/address/social-security-number records still would never have known.

People may judge the Reagans for having a threesome on cable TV, but no one will "un-marry" them. And while non-monogamy is one of my especially personal issues, it is only one of the almost infinite ways to expose the myth of "traditional marriage" in the status quo.

Some anti-gay activists call gay marriage the "slippery slope" that will also legalize polygamy. And yes, re-defining marriage may convince some people that it's possible to re-define marriage. But pragmatically, legal recognition of gay marriage doesn't change the laws much. The parts of marriage that the American government regulates now - i.e. inheritance, taxes, child custody - have already evolved through feminism to look past which spouse has a pee-pee and which spouse has a vajayjay.

Pragmatically, being legally married to more than one person at a time would create a lot more unprecedented legal situations. If one person divorces out of a triad, is the remaining couple entitled to twice as much property because there are two of them? If someone with two spouses dies, which spouse inherits what? If someone with two spouses and no living will is in a vegetative state, and the spouses disagree on whether to keep them artificially alive, what then?

Also pragmatically, I'm okay with having only one of my relationships on government records, because my boyfriend and I don't have joint property or a joint residence. Part of the beauty of polyamory is that not all romantic relationships have to lead to marriage anyway.

So it makes perfect sense that America is opening up to legally recognizing gay marriage before it opens up to legally recognizing polygamy and polyandry. But from the perspective of my straight but "non-traditional" marriage, I too am watching the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case on pins and needles, praying for Judge Walker and the Supreme Court to show as much sense and humanity as The Daily Show writers.

Your Friendly Television Sex-Toy Vendors

2010-01-10T16:05:00.000-06:00

Last night during a quiet evening in, my husband and I re-discovered what I find to be one of the more amusing things on late-night basic cable: the "Shop Erotic!" infomercial. If you haven't seen it, "Shop Erotic!" features two natural-looking, casually-dressed attractive women selling sex toys to their viewers at home. Their sales-pitch includes many paraphrases of, "A lot of people find this embarrassing or intimidating, but it's really not. Exploring new kinds of sex is fun both alone and with a partner." And I love the lack of sensationalism of these girl-next-door-types spreading the joy of exploratory sex on TV. Unfortunately for such an otherwise appreciated public service, they're selling sex toys that are ridiculously overpriced and impossible to clean. Which makes me assume that the business executives are counting on their audience's ignorance.

Yes, I love my sex toys, and can no longer imagine my sexuality without them. But then, I'm extremely grateful to my former university's feminist group, to my local lesbian-owned-feminist sex shop, and to my local kink scene for disseminating information on sex-toy-safety and proper cleaning. I strongly recommend Violet Blue's article on the subject, which explains:

Most sex toys (and products) that you’ll find in garden-variety retail sex toys stores are created, marketed and sold “for novelty use only”, meaning that while the toy companies explicitly know that people are using their toys for sexual use, they sell them categorized as “novelties." ...Novelties often feature the latest innovations in design and use — but also tend to break easily, some are made with noxious materials, and they can ship defective with user-unfriendly return policies...

...There are two basic hygienic differences you’ll need to know when choosing a toy: porous versus non-porous materials. Non-porous toys are made of materials (like silicone, hard plastic, glass, metal and stone) that are easy to clean and do not retain bacteria in the tiny pockets or pores in the surface. What this means is that when you clean one of these toys, they’re completely clean and don’t have the potential to carry STDs or bacteria that can infect (or re-infect) the user...

So I say thank you to the folks at "Shop Erotica!" for teaching that sex toys are fun, "non-intimidating," and can be associated with "nice, normal" women. But when spokeswoman Miyoko says of their Dual Penetrator 250, "Now ladies, you might be a little concerned about this because of the double penetration," I'd say double penetration isn't really the "concerning" part. I'm concerned that it has no materials disclosure, and that she doesn't advise anyone to cover it with a condom. This toy needs a condom, because I'm willing to bet that the surface is porous, which means that after you're done playing, you can't really clean it. Besides not knowing whether it leaches noxious chemicals.

I'm also seriously concerned that they're charging $111.49 for the 7th Heaven Blue Beaver, which looks like it's made of a similar cheap jelly and contains no materials disclosure. For comparison, I got my similarly-shaped Mary Mermaid from my local lesbian-owned-feminist sex shop for only about $80, and it's made of non-porous silicone, which can be bleached sterile. Similarly, there's no reason to spend $129.95 on "Shop Erotic!"'s glass Helix Dichio when you can get a same-size glass Las Vegas dildo from Tulip for $45.

So how do they stay in business? I suspect the general TV audience's unawareness of other sex-toy options or how much sex toys are supposed to cost, which is likely perpetuated by the general TV audience's embarrassment from doing their research. Perhaps they're charging an embarrassment tax.

And I remember being that embarrassed about buying sex toys, and needing someone to specifically tell me it was okay. I'm exceptionally lucky that when I turned eighteen, I had a close friend two months my senior who dragged me to our local sex shop and insisted that she wouldn't let me leave until I bought something. At the time, I too was intimidated by the wall of unknown possibilities. Then, for lack of better knowledge, I too bought a vibrator covered in a cheap jelly. And it probably gathered bacteria and leached chemicals for a couple years, until my university's feminist group hosted a presentation that convinced me to upgrade.

For everyone without a friend like mine, Miyoko at "Shop Erotic!" may serve the same influence. But then, here's a list of websites selling cheaper, higher-quality sex toys:

http://www.early2bed.com/
http://www.babeland.com/
http://www.goodvibes.com/
http://mytulip.com/index.php
http://www.smittenkittenonline.com/

Beyond The Green-Eyed-Monster

2010-01-05T19:53:00.001-06:00

Last weekend I went to a panel question-and-answer session geared toward newbies in the kink Scene. And the only question to specifically address non-monogamy was, "How do you deal with jealousy?" Which is the same first question I've gotten from most of my monogamous friends, and the same question that dominates a healthy percentage of polyamory discussion groups. It's an obvious question and an extremely legitimate one. But I don't understand how jealousy merits such be-all-end-all importance.

I don't pretend to be somehow immune to jealousy; of course I've been jealous of lover's other lovers before, and it's a miserable feeling. But then I have two options, which are: (1) Deal with it; or (2) Tell my husband and boyfriend that I want to be monogamous, in which case I would have to break up with at least one of them. And in the last three and a half years, there has never been a split-second that I honestly thought Option #2 could be less heartbreaking or melodramatic for me than dealing with jealousy.

How do I deal with jealousy? Well, how do I deal with sadness, or with anger, or frustration, or insecurity, or any other unpleasant emotion? My best jealousy-coping strategies suspiciously resemble the generalized coping strategies I've been using since I was fourteen and single: I rant in a private handwritten diary where it won't hurt anyone; I eat ice cream; I watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Sometimes I go for walks or sing karaoke. The Ethical Slut and Opening Up and non-monogamy message boards are full of great advice specifically addressing jealousy. But it's just an emotion like sadness or anger, and I don't feel a need to treat it that specially. It also fades over time, as I develop more experience with my lovers being with other people and then coming back to me.

In my experience, jealousy isn't the worst and certainly isn't the most interesting hurdle to polyamorous relationships. Society's prejudice stings too, as I learned from my poly friends fighting for custody of their children, and learned first-hand when my mother told me that my husband deserves a woman who can be faithful to him. My lovers' romantic difficulties and break-ups with other people also sting, because they make my lovers sad. Overall, most of the time, all the love and sex in my life make me pretty happy.

The discussion of how to deal with jealousy will go on, and of course it should. But there's really more to non-monogamy than this obsession with jealousy.

Sex Clubs: A History Lesson

2009-12-17T18:35:00.000-06:00

I love stumbling across alternative-sexuality history lessons. I love it because we're absent from most history accounts, due both to censorship and to our predecessors' desire for their own privacy. And then sexually liberated people and conservative reactionaries end up with the same misguided belief that rampant, shameless sexuality is something Westerners invented in the 1960's.

So I highly recommend Tony Perrottet's recent article for Slate.com, "Hellfire Holidays," about the sex clubs of 18th-century Britain. As Perrottet reports, "Sadly, during the prudish Victorian era, most references to these naughty clubs were scotched from the historical record. Horrified relatives burned embarrassing documents and club regalia. But their subversive antics survived in pornographic novels, travel guides to risqué tourist sites, and, of course, popular memory."

When most people first fall into an alternate-sex community, it does feel exotic and revolutionary. But seriously, the novelty and "naughtiness" wear off after a couple years. Despite getting off on exoticism, and despite mainstream shock, we the currently living haven't invented anything new. We have antecedents' example to follow and adapt; we simply have to study history that didn't make it to our textbooks.

The Advice Column and the Prostitute

2009-12-14T23:34:00.000-06:00

First, thank you to LaPrincipessa for a great post on the gender double-standard in adultery. I say thank you both because LaPrincipessa makes good points, and because she alerted me to the news that Ashley Dupre, one of the prostitutes involved in the Eliot Spitzer scandal, now has her own dating advice column with the New York Post. I realize that the New York Post has the same owner as Fox News, and mostly offers the same grossly oversimplified right-wing propraganda and celebrity gossip, but there's an idea with serious potential. The first step toward empowering a stigmatized group - such as sex-workers - is allowing individuals to tell their own stories to a wide audience. Objectively, Ashley Dupre has a lot of experience with sex, and likely a different perspective from my own, and which makes me curious what she has to say. Also, for everyone protesting that Ashley Dupre is a shameful whore, cover pages like:
continue to sell newspapers.

But then, the column itself disappoints me. Because Ashley Dupre has herself an attentive audience that she could enlighten on the realities of sex work and relationships, and so far all she's doing with it is repeating the same clichés we hear everywhere else. I don't find any of it explicitly offensive - which is more than I can say for more-mainstream Dear Abby or Ask Amy columns making the blogosphere rounds, or most of the New York Post. Ashley Dupre just prints (all heteronormative people's) meaninglessly broad questions (i.e. "Are there telltale signs a man isn't happy in his marriage?") and then answers with brief, cliché generalizations.

The one with which I personally would diverge is "Q: My boyfriend wants to know how many men I've slept with. Do I give an honest answer? A: You don't give him an answer at all. It's really none of his business (and vice versa)... Some things are better left unsaid." It's a perfectly ethical answer, but I'm curious why the advice-seeker's boyfriend wants to know. If he's prone to slut-shaming or uncontrollable jealousy, that should be relevant to whether the advice-seeker wants to date him. Personally, I don't care about anyone's tally, but hearing stories about my partners' exes helps me understand the person my partner is now. I don't demand 100% disclosure of everyone they ever touched before meeting me, because they deserve privacy and because some of those stories aren't as important or as interesting as others. But they're usually good stories. I also understand that most people have higher sexual jealousy than I do, in which case Dupre's advice is respectable. But it irks me that she writes as if all advice-seekers and all of their significant others will reach the same conclusions.

I suspect the culprit may be the New York Post, because Ashley Dupre does appear much more aware of human variation in her appearance on The View (which I also wouldn't normally cite for its affirmation of non-conformity). As she says in the clip below, "...And then there's the guy that screws around just because he can screw around. Most of the time, these are the men that should not be married. Or they should be in a relationship with someone who shares the same moral beliefs as them and be swingers...."

It's refreshing to see someone on a mainstream network talk-show talking so openly and shamelessly about sex work, and "I refuse to let what I did define me." I'm just crossing my fingers that her individual perspective may eventually shine through somewhere in her advice column, instead of merely repeating the New York Post's trite lowest-common-denominator drivel.

Experiments in Neurochemistry

2009-12-09T18:23:00.001-06:00

Since the last time I wrote about my premenstrual dysphoric disorder, I've had a couple particularly bad episodes of it, and I finally took all my friends' advice and went to a psychiatrist. Then, for the past month, I've been pondering what took me so many years. Part of it, I'm sure, was a general distrust of doctors and pharmaceuticals - anyone who stands to earn money by convincing me that my brain is "wrong" and that they can "fix" me. But some of my resistance has also been existential. As horrifically unpleasant as PMDD feels, it remains an intense passion. If my strongest feelings can be erased by taking pills, then what am I anyway? What does that mean for the rest of my emotions and for my personality? Is my entire consciousness mere hormone levels and neurochemistry?

Luckily, my psychiatrist earned my trust after asking if I've ever experienced panic attacks. I answered that I think I've had a couple in my life, but they're not a regular problem; I think the last one was a couple weeks before my wedding. She laughed and said, "That's normal; that's just part of being a bride." She didn't pretend that she could make me rational and happy all the time, or even that I should be rational and happy all the time. So I like her.

So for the last week, I've been exploring the sensation of being on a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. And it's been a pretty good week: All the little things that traumatize me on PMDD, or annoy me normally, have been mildly funny. On the first full day, I also had an intense dizzy spell that lasted almost two hours. But even then, I appreciated that I could explain to my co-workers, "I feel dizzy"; dizziness at the office doesn't have the stigma that crying does.

I've since lowered the dose, so the dizziness has been mild, but I'm still not entirely "myself." The SSRI-taking version of me is noticeably slower and more forgetful; my mind occasionally goes blank, even mid-sentence as I'm talking. But then, I also got through an entire month without dysphoria. The night that I would usually spend in the fetal position sobbing, instead I had dinner and great conversation with friends.

If "feeling like myself" means feeling like the 3/4 of time that I'm not premenstrual, then the SSRI is still much closer to "feeling like myself" than PMDD. I've always identified a bit with the absent-minded professor stereotype. So if I miss bits of conversation around me, is that the SSRI, or is that my natural daydreaming? I'll never know for sure.

Without the SSRI, if clients yell at me, how much of my distress is rational and how much is the PMDD? I'll never know for sure.

I'll be experimenting with a different SSRI next month to see if another version makes me less light-headed, but I'm entirely sold. Even if I still can't answer the questions of what the drugs mean for my "true" self. My "true" self is even more centered in my physical body than I thought.

A Poly Perspective on Celebrity Scandal

2009-12-04T18:04:00.000-06:00

I was at my boring desk job today, and my co-workers were talking about the Tiger Woods scandal in my earshot. They know a lot more than I do about the Tiger Woods scandal, because I haven't read a single article past the headline - because I really don't care. I don't play or watch golf, and most athlete/Hollywood celebrity scandals are tediously interchangeable, and Tiger Woods and I just don't have much influence over each other's lives. I don't feel a need to start caring about him now; if you're reading this outside of the U.S. and don't know what I'm talking about, Google him.

But one of my co-worker's more incredulous comments made me cringe with silent frustration: "And he's married to a supermodel!! And he cheated on her anyway!"

Okay, so here's the thing about sex with more than one person: Sometimes it really has nothing whatsoever to do with the original partner. I'll admit, of course, sometimes it does. Sometimes people first fall out of love with their "primary" significant other for any number of examples of incompatibility, and they stick around a doomed relationship either because they're too afraid to be alone until they find the next partner, or because they're too afraid to hurt the other person's feelings (which invariably backfires), or because of habit. Then they lie to their partners or spite them, which is where the real betrayal happens. I take it (from osmosis) that Tiger Woods lied to a lot of women, which makes him a liar. The women who trusted him have every right to feel outrage toward a liar, and I wouldn't begrudge any self-righteous co-worker banter over that.

But, writing as an honest adulteress, sometimes people just have sex with more than one person because they're attracted to more than one person - not because there's anything at all wrong in the original relationship. No one would seriously argue that having the Beatles or show-tunes on my iPod means that I must not actually love 1990's alternative music after all. And most people concede that it is possible to love more than one parent, more than one child, or more than one friend. I have sex with my boyfriend because I enjoy sex with my boyfriend, not because I don't enjoy sex with my husband. I quite emphatically enjoy sex with both of them, and I also enjoy that their bodies and specific preferences are different, because I enjoy variety. We're not insulting each other by rejecting monogamy. I like when my my partners are dating smart hotties; egotistically I like that they have good taste in women.

Yes, of course, cheating is different. But how many cheaters realize that honest non-monogamy exists as an alternative? I cheated on an ex a few times before I had ever heard of polyamory, because I didn't know then how else to handle being in love with two people. Would Tiger Woods have been more honest with the women in his life if he had had less justification to assume they'd react so very badly? Maybe and maybe not, but I wouldn't know; we're not that close.

Furthermore, there's really no correlation between supermodels and better marriages. Physical beauty is useful for initially attracting people, but it doesn't do much for sustaining meaningful relationships. Physical beauty doesn't even necessarily correlate with better sex; beauty doesn't signify sexual confidence, or experience, or creativity, or generosity, or compatible kinks, or stamina, or empathy, or any number of qualities that matter more to sexual satisfaction than looking pretty in photographs does.

I appreciate jaw-droppingly-hot TV stars like Gale Harold and Alyson Hannigan as much as the next person, but I still don't imagine that they're sexy enough to make monogamy sound tempting to me.

So... how is a modeling career in any way relevant?

I'm not sure, but I do know how often the banter of monogamous people feels alienating to me.

Hitchcock and the Tramp

2009-11-30T18:21:00.000-06:00

Recently, I finally got to see Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 film noir classic Notorious. And it was delightfully refreshing - especially in light of the inordinate amount of press going to the Twilight series these days, and its message that True Love (TM) must be chaste, obsessive, and monogamous, and that True Love (TM) mostly comes to good girls who wait.

Back in 1946, Alfred Hitchcock made his movie about the great romance of, in the parlance of the times, a "loose woman." As Notorious opens, our heroine Alicia Huberman, played by Ingrid Bergman, is freely enjoying the drinking and casual-sex parts of life. Into her life walks Mr. Devlin, played by Cary Grant, who talks her into a job with the U.S. government spying on Nazi war criminals. Alicia and Devlin quickly fall into a love affair, even as bad-girl Alicia smirks, "Every time you look at me I can see it running over the spokes: ...Once a tramp, always a tramp," and later, "You're sore because you've fallen for a drunk." Censorship rules at the time prohibited nudity or kissing more than three seconds on film; Hitchcock followed only the letter of those laws with the intimately sexy sequence starting at 3:30 below.

Not giving away much, as it becomes reasonably predictable, Alicia also starts having sex with the Nazi that Devlin has hired her to spy on. Which she discloses to her lover right after giving him other espionage-related intelligence: "Just a minor item but you may want it for the record. You can add Sebastian's name to my list of playmates." His initial reaction is predictably hurt and hurtful: "It wouldn't have been pretty if I had believed in you." But for all the accusations that Alicia is a loose woman, a tramp, an alcoholic, or a whore, her sexual charms very effectively earn the Nazis' trust, which is what makes her a competent spy. She knows exactly who she is, and why she does what she does; and what she does involves putting herself in great physical danger for the cause of fighting fascism. Without her "loose" sexual confidence, she wouldn't be as capable of a heroine.

This is not a film about polyamory, because obviously there is no honesty in reporting one's lover's activities to his enemy's government. But it is a film that exposes the falsehood that romantic love - with all the glory of Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant - must necessitate sexual exclusivity. The "tramp" risking her life for patriotism blends the binary between "bad girl" and "good girl." And in the end, love proves more important (and more interesting) than sexual jealousy.

Especially with all the New Moon billboards I have to pass on a daily basis, I am grateful to Alfred Hitchcock for a thriller glorifying the romance and the accomplishments of a slut.

Lolita Wolf in the New York Times

2009-11-22T21:56:00.000-06:00

Check out her beautiful photo essay, "The Kinky Lover":

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/1-in-8-million/index.html#/lolita_wolf

Politics and Pretty Boys Without Shirts

2009-11-22T17:39:00.000-06:00

So the Playgirl shots of Levi Johnston were released yesterday. I have to admit that I, like Jolie du Pre, have really been looking forward to them. ...Except, the couple pictures that have been released without charge aren't too exciting.

Surely relevantly, I'm sick to death of hearing about his ex-future-mother-in-law, whom I like to refer to either as "Bible Spice" or "Caribou Barbie." (I wish I could take credit for coming up with either.) For weeks, my Google Reader has been flooded with articles exposing the arch-conservative's hypocrisy, lies, and incompetence - sometimes with good satire. And honestly, I can't pay attention anymore. In her ideology, liberals are the direct tools of Satan, so the frothing wrath of liberals only helps her. All I want is for her to fade back into obscurity where she belongs, and I already regret this post's collaboration in keeping her famous.

But if I can't make her disappear, I can certainly enjoy a hot guy with his shirt off. Especially a hot guy who promotes safer sex on TV (however inarticulately). After Johnston came to fame on the heels of a politician who stands by abstinence-only policies that didn't even work for her own household and who charged rape victims for their own evidence, his juxtaposed sex-positivism is refreshing.

Watch CBS Videos Online

But after all that anticipation and political debate, the pictures are pretty bland. Yes, he's a very pretty boy. But at least in the teaser shots, he looks just like every other shirtless pretty teenage boy on television. For all the spite against Caribou Barbie and the hypocritical sex-negativity she stands for, I somehow expected the actual photographs of her nemesis to be more... interesting. (If anyone who has paid $19.95 to Playgirl for the rest of the shots found any more compelling, please do tell!)

Furthermore, I also find it important to note the double standard in Levi Johnston's current opportunities vs. Bristol Palin's. They participated in the exact same act at the same time together: Now he gets the glamorous contracts and Fleshbot Award, and she gets all the responsibility of raising a baby. Although Johnston has also claimed on TV that he would love to spend more time with his baby. (Who knows?) And I'm sure the media would love to buy a comparable Bristol-Palin-porn shoot. (Although she'd be subject to intense slut-shaming, if the reaction to Meghan McCain in pajamas is any indication.)

I appreciate Levi Johnston's calls for the comprehensive sex ed that he didn't get, but he's still an inarticulate teenager. ...But he does look pretty without a shirt.

Enjoy the pretty boy without a shirt.

The Semantics of BDSM vs. Kink

2009-11-19T21:43:00.001-06:00

I recently had the pleasure of dinner with someone who had traveled from another state to give a presentation at my local dungeon. Over dinner, we discussed his leadership work with his local Next Generation group. (For those who don't know, "The Next Generation" or "TNG" is a common name for BDSM-centered social groups for younger adults, usually age 18-35. There is no central TNG leadership as far as I'm aware, but there are TNG's in many cities throughout the U.S.) One of the changes he's been trying to make in his local TNG, he explained, was semantic. Instead of using the acronym "BDSM," (Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism), he refers to the groups' members exclusively as "kinky." Instead of "munches," they have "meet and greets."

"What's the difference?" asked everyone at our dinner table after the dungeon presentation.

"Oh, there's no difference at all, really. But for some reason, it seems to scare people less. When I tell people that I'm into BDSM, I get all the scared looks. But if I say I'm a little kinky, people are more likely to smirk or find it hot. It's more 'naughty' and less scary. Even if I'm doing the exact same things."

Which launched a conversation on whether or not we should be obligated to worry about scaring people outside the community. If we really cared what mainstream society thought of us, we probably wouldn't have met in our local dungeon in the first place. Regardless of vocabulary, openly embracing alternative sexuality requires a certain amount of ability to ignore judgment of others.

"But," he argued, "it's really not for vanilla people. I mean, greater acceptance is a perk, but I think de-mystifying is more important to people who are kinky but are still scared to admit it. If changing the semantics makes them feel more comfortable about joining us, then that's great."

Which brings back my clear memories of worrying that kinky desire made me a bad feminist, and/or crazy, and/or unlovable, and how those worries decimated my self-esteem in college. I can't say now if I might have read and absorbed SM 101 earlier if it had been called "Kink 101." (To maintain my honest disclosures, I still haven't read SM 101.) But I can't begrudge anything that might help nervous, newbie kinksters feel less freakish than I did.

At the same time, though, I fought hard for my acceptance of BDSM and for the courage to start going to munches. So I have an instinctual resentment to any implication that I ought to be more considerate of people who still think my lifestyle is scary. I know that it isn't. Most of my first munch revolved around a game of Scrabble. The first time I saw other people having sex in front of me (at my first BDSM party), I was eating brownies on the other side of the room, and the couple people I knew there were eating brownies with me and quoting Monty Python. I keep a public blog about my scary, scary sexuality now, and yet (alas) I still spend more hours per week in my fluorescent-lit office cubicle with bad coffee than I do actually having kinky sex. I don't feel even a little bit scary, and caring what other people think is exhausting.

So I'm unlikely to entirely drop the words "BDSM" or "munch" from my vocabulary. I use "kink" and "meet and greet" interchangeably with them, because they mean the same thing. But I can't help but wonder whether or not changing such semantics really would work for changing minds, or how one would even find closeted kinksters to ask them.

Sexy Violence in the Pentecostal Hell House

2009-11-06T18:01:00.001-06:00

For two primary reasons, I generally avoid writing about the American Moral-Majority-type Evangelical Christian movement. First, I think they already get overwhelmingly more attention than they deserve, and second, I don't want to humor the part of their binary-based ideology that classifies every person as either (a) Christian or (b) sexually liberal, and defines both camps in part by their mutual enmity. But I'm going to break my own boycott for a moment, because I was that enthralled by This American Life's recently repeated episode featuring Hell House.

As Ira Glass explains about ten minutes into the episode:

In 1999, documentary filmmaker George Ratliff read about a church in Cedar Hill, Texas, which is a suburb of Dallas, that was staging a re-creation of the Columbine Massacre. That church, Trinity Church, was putting on a haunted house, called Hell House. They'd been doing it every year for years, each Halloween. The Columbine scene was just one scene of about a dozen. There was also an abortion scene, there was a scene where a gay man dies of AIDS, and a scene where a mom meets a man on the internet and then deserts her family for that man... And the point is: Devils are around us, trying to trip us up, every day. Sin is real; the devil's real; so you better get right with God.

Which I was ready to dismiss as more generic conservative preaching - until I heard the actual sound-clip of teenage actors reenacting the death of Cassie Bernall (renamed "Carrie"). George Ratliff narrates the extreme violence onstage, including real handguns and props, and then we hear hysterical screaming and sobbing teenage voices: "Do you believe in God? Yes! I said do you believe in God? Yes, I believe in God!" and a gunshot. This was recorded in October 1999, only six months after the actual shooting. And despite my lifetime of secular liberalism, the sound-clip spooks me exactly as much as it's supposed to.

It unnerves me because, as intended, the impassioned shrieks make me momentarily forget my rational arguments about there being more than two potential lifestyles in all of human possibility. The violence shocks. It's terrifying, and thereby riveting theater. Staged violence has been holding audience attention at least since Oedipus killed his own father and then gouged out his own eyes, more than four hundred years before Jesus was born.

But fear makes an ironic tool for promoting chastity, because fear is sexy. That's how it grabs such rapt attention in the first place. Fear and good sex both defy reasonable arguments; they both tap us into powerfully primal, impulsive forces. Personally, few things snap me into a feeling horny as instantaneously as a lover's hand firmly on my throat. Fear forces me to focus all of my attention, and to give up the illusion that I can control everything. It's sexy as hell.

I can only imagine that, if I believed that everyone without shame of their sexuality went to hell, hell would be even sexier.

Which George Ratliff notices while watching the 2000 Hell House auditions:

The girls all want to be the suicide girl or the abortion girl, because those are the roles where you get to scream and cry and emote the most... Nearly everybody wants to play a sinner. Nobody wants to play a saint... Maybe it's just more fun to be evil onstage than good. Maybe playing a church-going, God-fearing Christian is just not that interesting if you are a church-going, God-fearing Christian. The organizers usually have to go out and recruit some hapless kids to play the good Christian roles...

If you ask the teenagers straight up if they have fun pretending to shoot their classmates or do drugs at a rave, they're all good Christian kids and know better than to admit that they enjoyed themselves... But Hell House is the biggest event of the year for Trinity Church. After three weeks of performances... the kids all get dressed up to the nines for an event that is the equivalent of prom night for them. They call it the Hell House Oscars.

He then plays a clip of Pentecostal teenager Liz Simmons accepting a "Suicide Award" for her portrayal of a character who goes to a rave, "sips her spiked drink, freaks out, gets gang-raped, and ends up killing herself, after admitting that her dad had molested her as a child."

It's too easy to point out all the levels of absurdity and offense of the premise, from the explicit blaming-the-rape-victim to the implication that just listening to non-Christian music will kill you. What's more interesting about Liz Simmons's acceptance speech is her Texan-accented cheeriness:

Well, I couldn't have done it without my rapers, so thank you Brent and David. And I just want to say it was really an honor to do this part. At first I was real uncomfortable with it, you know, when I heard that I was going to have to raped, and I was like, okay, what's that gonna be like, but it ended up being a lot of fun, and- [Laughter.] Okay, wait, I didn't say that right. No, I just really got to, got to meet a lot of people that I didn't know, and I had a- [Laughter.] Okay, this is only getting worse.

And then it would be too easy to point out that Liz Simmons didn't learn anything at all about drugs, or suicide, or rape, or even correct vocabulary word for "rapist." Obviously gaining a deeper understanding is not the point. The intended point is to panic teenagers out of sex and violence.

And the reason that so many teenagers audition for Hell House - and the reason so many other teenagers will pay $7 to watch - is that they've already figured out that portraying sex and violence is exciting.

Queering Heterosexuality

2009-11-04T17:42:00.000-06:00

Part of straight privilege is a general lack of expectation to question if or how we're really straight: People are usually assumed straight until they come out otherwise, and that gets the stamp of "normal."

But "normal" is such a vague and unhelpful way to write oneself off. Recently, I was reading the excellent essay anthology Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire, ed. Merri Lisa Johnson, and I came across Merri Lisa Johnson's plea for what she calls "queering heterosexuality": straight people adopting tenets of the queer rights movement, such as, "less restrictive gender roles," "nonreproductive sexuality, justified by pleasure alone," and "the nuclear family as one relationship configuration among many, not the norm." Because challenging rigid definitions of love and sexuality benefits everyone. Then, as I ponder my own "queered heterosexuality," I find myself daydreaming again about my friend J.

J and I met when we started high school, and we quickly became best friends and partners in our adolescent angst. One night when we were sixteen, I was comforting J over having recently been dumped by her boyfriend, and J declared in grand adolescent fashion that she hated all men, and from now on she would just be a lesbian. Single myself at the time, I told her that I agreed. And we repeated that we were totally serious - so we kissed each other on the lips. My heart somersaulted. And she started laughing with what I understood to be the glee of rebellion, and not really the glee of attraction to me.

After that, our "lesbian relationship" became one of our many inside jokes. We never got as far as kissing with tongues, and we continued to agonize over various cute boys (and agonize that our crushes undermined our status as autonomous, empowered women). But we would rage together against the boring narrow-mindedness of the suburb where we lived, and we'd walk through the mall holding hands and occasionally kissing on the lips, and then we'd claim disappointment when the strangers around us failed to react with any shock. I moved to another state a few months after the first kiss, and we wrote many long letters to each other. Her envelopes were always addressed to "Annabelle L.L. River," and only I knew that "L.L." stood for "Lesbian Lover."

The longer the "joke" went on, the worse it started to sting me when she would laugh about it. Because, I realized gradually, I really did want to do more with J than hold her hand at the mall. I wanted her. Her casual touch electrified me. But I didn't have any idea what to do about it, because I feared that revealing my genuine lust would ruin the "joke." Anyway, we were straight. We had to be straight, because we couldn't get rid of our lust for boys. J was the only girl I'd ever felt the same way about, and we were both pretty femme. Her exception to my heterosexuality bewildered me.

In the years since J and I lost contact, I've come to accept that sexual orientation doesn't work as a binary of either (a) straight or (b) gay - not even as a "tri-nary" including (c) bi. I prefer the Kinsey Scale by sexologist Alfred Kinsey, which sets up orientation as a continuous spectrum from 0 - 6, with 0 being exclusively straight and 6 being exclusively gay. Which still isn't a complete model, since he didn't leave clear space for transsexuals or intersex people. Anyway, I still usually call myself "straight," because it's briefer and simpler than calling myself a, "1 on the Kinsey scale," and because I'm madly in love with two cis men. But I've had a handful of very sexy encounters with women since I gave up the idea that I "couldn't" because "straight."

Later in the same essay anthology, Merri Lisa Johnson words it this way:

I recognize this reluctant identification now as common among bisexuals, never feeling quite bi enough, thinking only equal attraction and equal sex with men and women qualifies as "real" bisexuality. Those feminist porn stars on the west coast who make sex-ed videos with their cohabitational male and female partners are the "real" bisexuals; I'll just sit in the back and sneak out early.

...I lean toward being a heterosexual-identified bisexual woman... but bisexuality infuses my identity in small ways... and in large ways as well, like recognizing how fine the line is between friendship, desire, and fucking, challenging neat divisions like het/homo, mind/body, intellect/erotic, friend/lover. It's just not that simple.

So maybe by someone's definition I'm actually bi, but then, who's deciding exactly how much same-sex experience and/or desire tips the scale? And more importantly, who cares? There are no one-size-fits-all labels, and heterosexuality could use a good queering.

Havelock Ellis and Olive Schreiner: A History Mini-Lesson

2009-10-28T21:34:00.000-05:00

For all the increasing mainstream news coverage of polyamory, most articles still take the perspective of "exposing" something very new and innovative. Which I understand, because most people haven't heard of us. I've had a lot of positive coming-out experiences to a lot of open-minded people, but I've never come to out to anyone outside the BDSM Scene without having to explain what "polyamory" actually means. Certainly the campaign for visibility is a relatively recent phenomenon. The word was only coined in 1990, and The Ethical Slut only published in 1997. Before that, the terms "polygamy" oddly classified us with authoritative patriarchies (like Mormons), or phrases like "open relationship" inappropriately trivialized our "secondary" partners. Even "open relationships" get sensationalized as a modern phenomenon; a recent CNN article claims, "The 1970s introduced the concept of 'open marriage.'" (Emphasis mine.)

And many poly people enjoy the idea that we're doing something totally revolutionary. And maybe we are, in the sense that we have so few conspicuous precedents to follow. Except, if one reads the right history books, one finds that contemporary poly people aren't as original as we often credit ourselves. Which comforts me, because representing "The Next Sexual Revolution" puts a lot of pressure on my quotidian life, and hearing that my life "is enough to make any monogamist's head spin" makes me feel freakish. So I've started studying my history.

Starting with My Other Self: The Letters of Olive Schreiner and Havelock Ellis, 1884-1920, ed. Yaffa Claire Draznin, 1992. For some background history, Henry Havelock Ellis was one of the first published academic sexologists, and Olive Schreiner was a feminist author. Despite living in Victorian society, they formed a close, occasionally romantic friendship based on their equal intellects. The letters are full of philosophy, book recommendations, constructive criticism of each other's writing, and their shared passion for women's rights - when controversial women's rights included the right to vote and the right of married women to own property. In 1890, Ellis married Edith Lees. "Edith was a lesbian and had a number of affairs with women during their marriage, just as Havelock Ellis has some passionate (if asexual) affairs with other women; the two regularly discusses their respective affairs with each other." (Draznin, p. 468).

Excerpts that particularly warmed my heart:

I have just been going through Miss [Caroline] Haddon's paper which arrived again for the third time this afternoon. It is still more improved and is really a splendid paper... It is no longer a mere plea for polygomy. She says, for instance, that some women need for their mental development not only a large amount of sexual indulgence, but variety. I shall send it to the Westminster [Review] now.
-Havelock Ellis to Olive Schreiner, December 18, 1884

I must live to write that story I've had in my head so many years, about the woman who marries a man who's loved another woman as a mistress before and how she gets the other woman so beautifully to live with them. What Aldis says about monogamy being our present highest aim but something higher coming after it, I've felt so long but never seen expressed anywhere.
-Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, July 7, 1885

I see she [Caroline Haddon] represents you as saying that all marriage must be monogamous. But that is a mistake - is it not? - unless you have changed your opinion lately. You would not set down any rigid dogma like that which weakens rather than strengthens one's position. There must always be variations under natural and healthful conditions.
-Havelock Ellis to Olive Schreiner, February 2, 1886

I believe the only remedy for the agony and suffering that sex inflicts is absolute truthfulness and openness. Not after you are found out but before!! I do not believe a man or woman ever enters on a real sex relation with a man [or] woman without knowing they are sexually attracted to one another. If it is only a few hours before you would have time to tell the person whose sexual life you had forever bound with yours what you are feeling.
-Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, December 12, 1911

So much for the "new" sexual revolution and my own strangeness.

Adventures of a "Bad Girl" with Sinus Congestion

2009-10-23T17:49:00.000-05:00

In the cultural binary between "good girls" and "bad girls," I definitely spent my formative years as a "good girl": I got straight A's, mostly didn't drink or smoke pot until college, and I was too insecure to act on my slutty fantasies. But then I became a sadomasochistic polyamorous adulteress who writes about sex on the internet, which I'm told now qualifies me as a "bad girl." So today I was waiting in line at Walgreens to buy Kleenex for my runny nose (you know, the way that "bad girls" do) and I was highly amused to see that this month's issue of Cosmopolitan proclaims on its cover: "Bad Girl Issue: For Sexy Bitches Only."

The magnificent Evil Slut Clique has already intelligently skewered the November 2009 issue of Cosmo (as they've done to previous issues), and I should confess that I didn't actually spend $4.29 to bring the magazine home to quote it more accurately. But considering my own "bad girl" credentials - and the long line to buy Kleenex - I caved to my curiosity and flipped to find out which "bad girls" made the honor list. And there in the top left corner of the page was Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, First Lady of France, and a reference to her infamous quote, “I‘m monogamous from time to time, but I prefer polygamy and polyandry.”

And maybe I'm just naive, but I got excited. I dislike Bruni's husband's politics, but has Cosmopolitan really caught up to the possibility of honest non-monogamy?!

Then I turned the page for tips on how to be a better "bad girl." Top of the page: Get really good at telling white lies, so you don't get caught. First example: If you tell your boyfriend that your ex wasn't at the party you went to, make up more details about the party where you "didn't" see your ex.

I'm sorry, but lying doesn't make you a fun/sexy/exciting "bad girl"; it just makes you a liar. More lies will make your first lie more believable for a while, but then you'll need lies to protect those lies, and then to avoid getting caught you'll need to remember all the lies. The truth is easier on the conscience, builds much stronger relationships, and is much easier to remember. Besides my genuine confusion: Why would seeing an ex be worth lying about? Polyamory isn't for everyone, but if your significant other becomes intolerably jealous that easily, and/or doesn't trust you, and/or doesn't have any reason to trust you, then do you actually like dating them?

But wait! If I reject monogamy, and I reject dishonesty, does that make me a "bad girl" or a "good girl"?

Surprise: It's like celebrating "bad girls" reinforces another false binary, and doesn't actually liberate anyone.

Embracing the "woo-woo" in kink

2009-10-20T18:03:00.000-05:00

For many self-identified sadomasochists, BDSM is an expression of spirituality as much as sexuality. And I should disclose that I haven't been one of those people, because I've never been highly spiritual. I enjoy certain religious rituals too much to call myself an atheist: The rituals generally mean time with my family and large quantities of food, and who can argue against that? From my religious standpoint, a story doesn't have to be literally true to be relevant or powerful, and I generally prefer the world the five senses.

But there's a sizable overlap between the Western polyamory subculture and pagan subculture. Stick around the poly or BDSM scenes long enough, and you're bound to hear someone quoting Raven Kaldera's Pagan Polyamory: Becoming a Tribe of Hearts or Easton & Hardy's Radical Ecstasy: SM Journeys to Transcendence. You're bound to hear people talking about their play in terms of energy work and chakras and tantra. There are whole workshops on spiritual BDSM. And I've always reacted to it the same way that I react to more "mainstream" religions, which involves faith that it works for other people, but no personal inner connection.

I try not to offend people by using the phrase "woo-woo" - but I do have a lot of respect for people who sometimes refer to their own spirituality as "a little woo-woo." Humor and self-awareness make almost anything more accessible.

So about a week ago I attended a presentation on negotiating spontaneous mini-kink-scenes, and I jumped up as a volunteer because I'm exhibitionist. And then the presenter announced that this was going to be the "woo-woo" portion of the class. He asked me if I've worked much with my chakras before, and I admitted no. He said that that was fine; all I had to do was maintain eye contact with him, and he would open up his own first chakra and then pass the energy into me. Which, I have to admit, sounded pretty woo-woo. But I focused into his eyes, and - even though we had never met, and five minutes earlier I had found him charismatic and intelligent but not especially sexually attractive - I suddenly felt an enormous wave of very real sexual tension. After a few moments he broke off eye contact to speak to the audience again, and I felt flustered, almost dizzy.

I took my seat again and snuggled up to my husband, and the class went on. About ten minutes later, the presenter asked how I was doing again, and I honestly answered, "Fine." He nodded and pointed out to everyone, "See, we were working up some great sexual energy for a minute there. But now our connection is mostly gone, because she took the energy and passed it on to her partner there. Which is great; that's exactly what polyamory is all about." To which I say: Indeed.

The next day I was still pondering the notion that "woo-woo" energy-passing from opening up certain chakras might work on me after all, and I finally started skimming Radical Ecstasy. (My husband got a copy as a present from an ex-girlfriend, and neither of us had ever read it.) I had always assumed that it would be inaccessibly "woo-woo" to a secular girl like me, but then I read Janet Hardy's passage:

What is sacred, I think, is attention... If all I can think about is how much money there is in my checking account and whether the $200 tire will last twice as long as the $100 one, I miss the astonishing realization that the tread under my hand passed through the rain forest and the steel mill and the conference room of a Madison Avenue ad agency and the shipping department of Costco; and that handing my credit card to the clerk has connected me with hundreds of people I'll never meet, with trees I can't climb and a factory whose workings I don't begin to understand; and that I breathed in molecules from those people's skin and oxygen exhaled by those trees and pollution floating in the air from that factory before I ever considered buying the tires.

It is with some reluctance - well, kicking and screaming, honestly - that I've come to conclude that the energy, or kundalini, or life force, or whatever it is we are writing about in this book, is absolutely real: when something lifts me off the floor and slams me against a wall, that's evidence enough for me. But nothing about it strikes me as particulary "spiritual." To me, it's a physical energy, just like electricity: a form of energy that we don't have the right instruments to measure yet.

Now if that's spiritual, then everything is spiritual. And, yeah, of course everything is spiritual, but used that way the word has no meaning - when I look up a word in the dictionary, I like to find a more precise definition than "See also: all other words in the dictionary" - so we're back to the beginning.

And once I actually pay attention, I find that some tenets of "woo-woo" spirituality aren't so different from my own beliefs after all.

Filament Magazine: The Thinking Woman's Crumpet

2009-10-17T00:52:00.000-05:00

To clarify from my celebration of "Dress Like a Whore" Day: I do understand the Feminism 101 concepts of the "male gaze" and its companion objectification, wherein women are reduced to bodies existing only for men's pleasure. There is already a huge assortment of feminist treatises showing how objectification and unrealistic beauty expectations damage women. But then, however problematically, none of my Women's Studies courses have stopped me from feeling a great erotic charge from intentional exhibitionism. So for years I've been working to articulate how I, as woman, can occasionally enjoy the role of the flashy slut without being reduced to "only" a slut. (Step one is the deliberate choice.)

And then a fellow kinky female friend introduced me to the brilliant Filament magazine, subtitled "The Thinking Woman's Crumpet." Instead of fighting the erotic "gaze" as inherently evil, Filament fights for straight women's right to gaze at men.

To put a philosophy behind its glossy pages of beautiful naked men, editor Suraya Sidhu Singh writes in Volume II:

It's hard to imagine how a society in which women are seen as erotic subjects by men, but men are not seen as erotic subjects by women, can also be a society in which broader equality exists... The vista in every newsagent suggests that being an erotic subject is a gender role, not a personal choice.

And continues on Filament's FAQ page:

Surely popularising erotic images of men legitimises degrading images of women?
‘Erotic’ and ‘degrading’ are polar opposites as far as we’re concerned. It’s natural to be attracted to viewing the human form erotically, and there is nothing inherently degrading about the subject being less clothed or more aroused. In conducting our research we’ve been heartened by the kinds of things that women are asking to see, namely more erotic imagery that depicts the subject as a person, not a sex object. We’re proud of catering to such twisted fancies.

These things research says women like in an image, it would be safe to assume men like the opposite?
No, in fact, that would probably be wrong. If anything, research suggests men and women find similar image qualities erotic.
The assumption that women and men are chalk and cheese is perhaps what led erotic image aimed at women to be so unappealing to women in the past. Erotic images for men are almost always shot in colour and in recognisable locations, and the models are usually looking at the camera. Meanwhile, supposedly erotic images for women are usually in black and white, shot on a plain studio backgrounds and often, the model’s whole head is out of frame. There was never any evidence to suggest women liked that kind of thing; it arose from the assumption that male and female erotic tastes were oppositional, which is wrong.

But what's especially refreshing about Filament (and little other pornography I've found on the internet or newsstands) is that it also presumes its readers' intellect. Instead of selling itself as "naughty," Filament intersperses between its nude photographs well-written articles that aren't necessarily "sexy." For example, Issue 2 includes a history of England's 19th-century prostitution laws, one woman's experience raising a child with cerebral palsy, and an explanation of the Afro-Brazilian art of capoeira - along with advice for strap-on pegging. It's almost as if they think women who want to look at and/or fuck pretty men also enjoy intellectual learning!

Which really should not be a novel idea, but then, I've never seen a magazine quite like it before.

Filament is based out of England but ships anywhere in the world. Support them.

In Praise of "Dress Like a Whore" Day

2009-10-15T03:39:00.000-05:00

It's almost Halloween again, which at least in the United States means it's time for the annual panic shared equally by the right and the left: Girls' Halloween costumes are too slutty.

Now, I'll quickly agree that most pre-packaged "sexy" Halloween costumes for women are just ridiculous. (Take for example Sexy Finding Nemo, Sexy Taxi, or Sexy Policewoman with the word "Busted" across her chest.) They're also expensive and poorly made: Despite the ubiquity of the Leg Avenue brand, I've never worn any of their clothing twice without ripping it, and yet they charge over $50 for a costume. I confess that I drooled a little over their wood nymph costume hanging in a store window this year, but I'm an average size 10, and I could barely get the size-large over my head without ripping. When I gave it back to the salesgirl and told her it was too small, the salesgirl (who was visibly shorter and skinnier than I am) nodded and confessed that she didn't know who's supposed to fit in these. Regardless of what you want to be or how much skin you want to display or conceal, making or thrifting your own costume is more creative and usually more fun.

But the media and blogosphere don't seem especially concerned about pricing, quality, or size-ism of pre-packaged costumes. The politically correct concern for Halloween costumes is to protect our impressionable daughters from the dangers of sexuality. And yes, of course, children should be strongly protected from sexual coercion of any kind. But I think the concerned conservatives and the concerned feminists both underestimate how early puberty naturally sparks lust. I started masturbating and writing long obsessive diary-entries about "cute boys" when I was eleven. I could barely look the "cute boys" in the eye when I was eleven, but that's when the hormones set off my private imagination.

So I wholeheartedly agree that the little girl in this short-skirted ragdoll costume is too young for sex. But I don't believe that her short skirt necessarily means that she is having sex, or even that she will in the next few years. I would like to think that she'll have a fulfilling, self-aware, consensual sex life in ten or fifteen years - and puberty is when most people start the long process of self-discovery and experimental fantasy that makes that possible. If a teen or "tween" girl wants to play-act in a shorter skirt than she would usually wear, I think it's less empowering to shame her than to make sure that her sexual beliefs are medically accurate; that she understands that her own pleasure is as important as any hypothetical partner's; that she has the support of trustworthy adults and friends; and that she has enough self-confidence to say no and walk away from anything that makes her uncomfortable. What scares me is the confusion and low self-esteem that follow the juxtaposition of pre-packaged, consumer "sexiness" and abstinence-only "education" teaching our daughters to shame "sluts."

Halloween is one night a year to celebrate fantasy. Really KJ Dell'Antonia said it best:

"I distinctly remember the annual struggle to come up with a Halloween costume that conveyed my hidden assets and yet didn't look like I was trying too hard, and certainly anything that involved fishnet tights invariably fit the bill. When everything fell together, the feeling I remember best was one of power—of flaunting what felt like a rebellious choice in front of peers and adults alike, risk free. Were men and boys looking at me in inappropriate ways? I guarantee that I hoped so. I also guarantee that I knew—as do the vast majority of people—that I was not inviting my drama teacher to go all Roman Polanski on me."

So I will laugh at the inanity of dressing up as a "Sexy Martini Glass," and I will delight in my once-a-year opportunity to wear my fetish clothes down the street. To the people cringing at teen girls' thighs, I have to say: Pick your battles.

Pro-Polyamory-Rights, Pro-Disability-Rights Lesbian appointed to EEOC

2009-10-10T20:30:00.000-05:00

Is there any way that I can sufficiently thank Chai Feldblum?

Last week Barack Obama appointed Chai Feldblum as the first open lesbian to the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Her Georgetown Law professor biography page lists some of her outstanding and diverse credentials in the realm of fighting discrimination:

"J.D. Harvard... A former law clerk for First Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Frank M. Coffin, and Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, Professor Feldblum has been a leading advocate and scholar in the areas of disability rights, health and welfare rights, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, and workplace issues. She played a leading role in the drafting and negotiating of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008. She has also helped draft and negotiate the Employment Nondiscrimination Act and various medical privacy bills and regulations."

All of the above issues are good fights worth fighting, and all will inspire the usual name-calling and fear-mongering from the radical right. But in an especially rare move for someone entering the public spotlight, Chai Feldblum also signed the statement "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision For All Our Families and Relationships" - along with her esteemed company of Gloria Steinum, Judith Butler, Betty Dodson, and Barbara Ehrenreich. The Catholic News Agency's headline calls it a "'Manifesto' that Praised Polygamy", but then, the Catholic News Agency hasn't done enough research to realize that we usually now prefer the term "polyamory" over "polygamy." What the statement actually says, in part, is:

Marriage is not the only worthy form of family or relationship, and it should not be legally and economically privileged above all others. A majority of people – whatever their sexual and gender identities – do not live in traditional nuclear families. They stand to gain from alternative forms of household recognition beyond one-size-fits-all marriage. For example:

· Single parent households

· Senior citizens living together and serving as each other’s caregivers (think Golden Girls)

· Blended and extended families

· Children being raised in multiple households or by unmarried parents

· Adult children living with and caring for their parents

· Senior citizens who are the primary caregivers to their grandchildren or other relatives

· Close friends or siblings living in non-conjugal relationships and serving as each other’s primary support and caregivers

· Households in which there is more than one conjugal partner

· Care-giving relationships that provide support to those living with extended illness such as HIV/AIDS.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

There is the usual, predictable right-wing backlash, which I don't feel like gracing with much attention, except that it maintains its entirely ignorant assumption that "households in which there is more than one conjugal partner" characterize only patriarchal Mormons, Muslims, and "cultists." I laughed aloud at Rev. James Heisner's statement through the John Birch Society:

"Technically, the Beyond Marriage defense of 'loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner' would include not only polygamy but also polyandry, but it’s not hard to imagine that “loving households” that include more than one husband sitting on the sofa and telling the wife to get them another beer isn’t really all that high on the agenda of folks like Professor Feldblum."

In part because my last three years of polyandrous polyamory have been some of the happiest of my life, and in part because it's rare to see a male conservative paint such an offensive stereotype of men. Another poly woman had already commented teaching Rev. Heisner the word "polyamory"; my response is on the John Birch Society's Comments section and also below:

Speaking as a legally married woman who has also had a boyfriend for the last three years, and who has always been entirely honest with my husband and has his support: I assure you that polyandry is actually just as real as polygamy, and we are are grateful for Ms. Feldblum's support. I am not "normally associated with Moslems and cultists," and I do call myself a feminist. And yes, most of the modern people who honestly maintain multiple romantic relationships at the same time prefer the term "polyamory." The most respected books about polyamory - The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy, and Opening Up by Tristan Taormino - were both written by women.

Reconciling feminism and multiple loving partners isn't difficult at all: Feminism is all about the freedom of choice. What strikes me as both offensive and simply ignorant is your assertion that polyandry can only mean "more than one husband sitting on the sofa and telling the wife to get them another beer." Do you actually believe that a man's only role in a romantic relationship is to sit on the sofa and demand beer?

....Thank you Chai Feldblum. You are a beacon of hope, and may you have many productive years on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The Bureaucracy of "Holy Matrimony"

2009-10-06T01:52:00.000-05:00

About six weeks after my wedding, I'm finally getting around to legally changing my name. Which is a highly personal and arguably an eccentric choice for me to make as a polyamorous feminist. I've heard all the arguments for keeping one's maiden name, and I confess that I have no rational argument against them. My husband and I are still separate individuals. ...But for a few weeks after the wedding, every time I said, heard, or signed my name with my husband's last name, I did get a kick of girlish glee. It's a cool name. And now that the novelty is wearing off of it, my maiden name has started sounding increasingly strange to me.

So now that I'm succumbing to this "traditional" marriage custom, I've had a lot of time of sitting in fluorescent-lit government lobbies to ponder the difference between the personal/cultural recognition of marriage and the government's recognition of marriage. Because the inescapable part of any government institution is that it involves a rather a lot of very dull paperwork and standing in line. Which I am willing to do for all of the pragmatic legal advantages of a public record that my husband and I will be sharing our taxes, property, and financial decisions, and in order to have the name that I now prefer to be called listed on my legal identification and credit accounts. But after spending an absurd amount of money on a "search fee" to get our marriage-certification papers from the county (which didn't even guarantee that the county was going to find them), and filling out dozens of forms with my social security number, my parents' social security numbers, and my husband's social security number, I am freshly baffled how politicians and pundits argue that "traditional" marriage laws have any relationship whatsoever to any religious values.

My husband and I did have a religious officiant, in accordance with our families' cultures. But our chosen religious officiant also performs same-sex ceremonies, and proclaimed during our ceremony that marriage is not something that the government or even he could confer onto us. Marriage is a relationship that we had already built. Then, for our association with a liberal humanist congregation, we get the exact same legal treatment as married strict-Evangelicals or married atheists.

So now that I'm getting familiar with those legal aspects, I would be entirely fascinated to meet someone who actually believes that spending the first two hours waiting to be called at the Social Security Administration only to be told that I didn't have the proper paperwork from the county (and that the Social Security agent had no idea how I should go about getting the county's paperwork) is part of a religious, holy sacrament. (And I haven't even gotten around to the Department of Motor Vehicles or the State Department.)

Some liberals - and even Forbes Magazine - have argued convincingly that the government should stop recognizing marriages altogether. But legal marriage is a convenient shortcut for so many legal issues that would otherwise end up in lawsuits or without the weaker party's ability to enforce their rights: who owns property, who gets property if someone dies without a will, who is allowed to or legally obligated to take care of children, who's allowed to make decisions if we're medically incapacitated, etc. etc. The laws are objectionable in many ways, including the explicitly heterosexist and monogamist bias, and the fact that so many people are in bad marriages. But as we seek to liberalize the institution, I'm not convinced that we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Once again, I recommend lesbian E.J. Graff's book What Is Marriage For? for charting how Western marriage laws have already changed significantly over the past century - with a trend toward liberalization. (And for all the conservative politicians' and pundits' shrieking about the Death of the Family, the similarly apocolyptic cries of their 19th-century counterparts against letting married women own bank accounts or vote have yet to be substantiated.)

So I will limit my ranting about government bureaucracy, fill out my paperwork, and continue to argue that the marriage laws should be re-written to apply to any two or more people that want to get married. Pragmatically, legal marriage is an amalgamation of a large number of civil and financial rights, and it's well worth fighting for. But let's be honest about the role the government plays in heterosexual marriage now: which is to manufacture and maintain copies of bureaucratic paperwork.

Any time now that I hear a politician or pundit confer holy, religious sanctimony onto the government's recognition of marriage, I wonder what part of waiting in the lobby of the county clerk's office was supposed to offer spiritual revelation.

Report from the Folsom Street Fair

2009-10-01T04:55:00.000-05:00

After my last few posts on homophobia, the Family Research Council, and the U.S. Republican Party - It's a lot more fun to write about the Folsom Street Fair, which I attended last weekend with my husband, my boyfriend, and a couple friends. I'd been hearing about it for years: the third largest street fair in the state of California, with about 300,000 - 400,000 people celebrating the BDSM subculture in the open air. It's an opportunity for a dazzling mass of kinky people to get together in public without any of the usual constraints of subtlety or discretion. And when I say that it isn't subtle or discrete, I mean that they have someone in leather dancing in a cage suspended from a crane in front of a church.

I didn't come away from the fair with any new revelations, but it's a heck of a great party. I'm also glad that we showed up early, before it was too crowded. Shortly after the fair opened, we paid the suggested donation supporting local charities and started exploring. (People who don't donate are still allowed in, but don't get the sticker good for $1 off some of the food and drink items.) There were booths promoting various BDSM social organizations, and awareness of various health issues, and gay men's sports teams, and a gay-friendly, woman-pastored Evangelical church, and the the Sex Workers Outreach Project. There were booths selling metal jewelry, and the standard street-festival food and overpriced beer, and mostly there were booths selling all kinds of BDSM toys and fetish-wear. There were people in leather and latex, and people in drag, and people in jeans, and naked people. There were a few organized spectacles, including live music and the cage-dancer. Kink.com elaborately tied up some porn stars; the Society of Janus ran a charity spanking and flogging booth; a local bathhouse ran a Nearly Naked Twister game to benefit a clinic that provides health care and social services to sex workers. And with another eye toward environmentalism, next to almost every trash can was a recycling bin and a compost bin, with volunteers making sure refuse went to the right bin.

...And for all that excitement, my one complaint is that by one o'clock it was too crowded to see much. I was also wearing latex, which always makes me feel deliciously sexy - except that it's also hot temperature-wise, and in San Francisco September is still summer. When I couldn't stand my own sweat anymore, I took my top off entirely. I'd never before gone entirely topless in a public crowd - not because I'm shy, but because it's usually illegal. In the context of the Folsom Street Fair, the usually male privilege of going shirtless when the weather is just too hot for a shirt was mine.

No one has to join a public spectacle in order to enjoy kinky sex. But it is a welcoming and celebratory culture, and an awful lot of fun.

Gay Marriage and Pickles

2009-09-25T21:21:00.000-05:00

I was at a party recently and stumbled into a conversation where someone was stating their opposition to gay marriage rights. I have to admit, this doesn't happen to me often; I live in a big city, and the overwhelming majority of people with whom I personally associate take the desirability of gay rights for granted. So I pulled out all the arguments that I usually save for the proverbial choir, and asked this fellow why he opposes gay marriage. To be fair, neither of us were sober for this debate, but he didn't claim to have any rational arguments, and he didn't cite religion.

All of his arguments came down to re-wording, "Being gay is wrong because anal sex is gross. Ewww."

Which he said with taken-for-granted conviction, like he assumed that just because I'm a straight woman I've never fucked a man's ass before. Actually, I highly recommend it. I've also watched every episode of Queer as Folk, which I mostly find melodramatic, except that its man-on-man sex scenes are some of the hottest soft-core porn scenes ever to air on television. And I'm not the first straight woman to say so. So I can answer that particular homophobia with enthusiastic conviction: "You don't know what you're missing." To which he gaped incredulously and repeated, "Ewww." Which is hard to debate, really, because what makes people horny is always individualistic and irrational. And then I realized: This fellow's opinions on anal sex may be a lot like my opinions on eating pickles.

I don't mean to take the metaphor very far, because I realize that it's a flippant one, and I don't mean to make light of the struggle for gay equality. Of course I understand that a taste for pickles is not vital to a person's identity the way that sexual orientation is. But personally, I can't stand pickles, and I never have. Every once in a while, I bite one by mistake, not realizing that they've been snuck onto a sandwich, and I immediately spit it out and start gagging. They just taste rancid to me. It's a bizarre and unfortunate thing to do to a perfectly good cucumber. Whenever I get a pickle spear on a plate with a sandwich, I offer it to anyone sitting near me, and often they'll take it happily and say something like, "Awesome! I love pickles!" and tell me all about their favorite variety of pickle. Pickles still repulse me. They probably always will.

However, it would be pretty absurd and reprehensible of me to sign petitions or vote on referendums to block other people from eating pickles. And it's socially unacceptable in most circumstances for me to even tell anyone just how much I hate pickles, not because the First Amendment doesn't protect my right to disparage pickles, but because it would be obnoxious and negative and pointless. My visceral nausea does not make eating pickles wrong. I accept that people will occasionally eat pickles right in front of me. I can still walk through Jewish delis and grocery stores with whole shelves of pickles in glass jars. I still periodically get free pickles on my plate with sandwiches. I ignore all of this and go on with my life. What I do about my disgust is: I don't eat the pickles. I promise, it really is that easy.

And even then, it saddens me that I will never feel the joy that someone who likes pickles feels when they bite into a good pickle. Other people genuinely enjoy pickles, and my own loathing for them is ultimately my own loss.

So I pulled out that argument too, and I still don't think that I got anywhere with that particular drunk homophobe. You can't really argue with a reaction as irrational and visceral as, "Eww." What still infuriates and baffles me is how anyone makes the illogical leap from "Eww" to a grandiose political posture.

Demystifying Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder

2009-09-23T13:06:00.000-05:00

I have premenstru al dysphoric disorder, or PMDD for short. It's what doctors call the more popular "premenstrual syndrome" when the psychiatric symptoms are so severe that they prevent you from basically functioning.

From a feminist political standpoint, it's a deeply troubling diagnosis. Women have had to fight hard over the last century to combat the sexist stereotype that we're somehow inherently more emotional and less rational than men are; and that stereotype has kept women out of leadership positions for centuries. In Victorian times, the medical concept of "hysteria" made femaleness virtually synonymous with insanity. So I definitely understand why, as John F. Kihlstrom writes: "Some feminist professionals, including the APA’s Committee on Women and the National Coalition for Women’s Mental Health, objected to the inclusion of such a syndrome under any label. From their point of view, menstruation is a normal bodily function, and any psychological changes associated with this function should be seen as normal as well. Classifying PMS or PMDD as a mental disorder stigmatizes women..."

But for all my rage against disempowering stereotypes, my actual experience of PMDD resembles bipolar disorder a lot more closely than it resembles vaginal bleeding. I've been keeping a paper diary since I turned twelve, and I keep it mostly in narrative format. Then, throughout the diaries of my early teen years, there are sporadic entries of suicidal rants with no "story" whatsoever, just repeating over and over that I hated myself and wanted to die. Generally, the entry before or after would be something cheerful and mundane, like "I did well on today's English test," or "Today I went with my friends to the mall" - offering no clue toward why I might have felt suicidal the day adjacent. Only years later do I recognize: That's the record of my early menstrual cycle. One of the more impressively oblivious rants from age thirteen claimed, "My mom says I only feel this way because of my hormones. Which proves that my mom doesn't understand anything. I hate her!"

Luckily for me, my mother knew what she was talking about. She put me on birth control pills when I was sixteen, despite the fact that I really was a virgin. The birth control pills suddenly gave me a predictable 28-day cycle. There's no way of knowing how much the relative alleviation of my breakdowns can be attributed to hormone regulation and how much was just getting older and thus further from the universal hellhole of puberty. But once I had a 28-day cycle, it was much easier to notice the correlation between my worst mood swings and the reminder to stash pads in my backpack. By the time I got to college, I had built enough self-awareness to mark my calendar, not plan anything strenuous or important on premenstrual days, and warn my roommate and boyfriend, "Next Wednesday I'll probably be crazy, so don't worry about me then. I'll feel better on Thursday." Given the quantity of sporadic suicidal thoughts I had between ages twelve and fifteen, the medical intervention of birth control pills may have saved my life.

Each month, the PMDD usually starts with an overreaction to some minor catalyst, and then it takes me at least a minute to connect that I am overreacting. In this state I have cried at TV life insurance commercials (the ones with people ruminating on what would happen to their loved ones if they died), and I have literally shaken with rage at simple requests from my boss. And every time I catch myself is surreal: What I'm feeling strongly is not my feelings. That's just dysphoria. But the faster I catch it, the better I can usually calm myself down. Heightened self-awareness doesn't make it go away exactly, but it does allow me to assure myself: You don't actually believe that. You're stronger than this. You'll definitely feel better tomorrow. At which point it's easier to laugh at my own absurdity. If I was unhappy a few days earlier, too, I find myself dwelling more energetically on my problems, but I still know better than to confront anyone the day before my period. And when everything else in my life is going well, then I find myself dwelling on the frustration of PMDD itself and the burden of my "defective brain."

And then, not every month but sometimes, then there is no catalyst, and there are no thoughts in my head but pain. I just curl up in the fetal position and writhe and sob. (This is when it's especially important to have warned the people I live with in advance.)

I did get a prescription for anti-depressants at one point, but they came with a severe side effect of insomnia. So I had the choice of being crazy from PMDD or crazy from not sleeping for a week at a time, so I quit taking the pills. The one great miracle cure is marijuana. Pot's "side effects" still prevent me from any kind of productivity, but if I know that I'm going to spend several hours useless on my couch, spending them high is a lot more pleasant than spending them crying.

I am infuriated by the stigma, but not because doctors recognize PMDD as a medical disorder. Claiming a medical disorder is how I rationalize myself through it, and treat the symptoms with marijuana while I wait to feel better. What degrades me are the general taboos against discussing menstruation, or "craziness." I've gotten more comfortable discussing PMDD over time with my friends, which is a godsend when it starts to come on and I'm free to be honest about why I suddenly start acting strange and need to go home. But there's little worse than needing a good cry while I'm at my day job or a large family event, and feeling that it's "not okay" to talk about my menstrual cycle or my mental illness - let alone both at once. But if PMDD must be kept private, then what am I supposed to do when I can't stop myself from crying and it's that awkward to tell anyone why? Usually I hide in bathrooms, or comb my hair over my eyes and try to be very still and very quiet and hope nobody tries to talk to me. But boy would it be easier to just choke out between sobs, "I have PMDD and I'm going to go be alone for a while," without the rational fear of losing respect. In my ideal society, PMDD would have the same social implications as migraines: an unpleasant medical issue that makes people need to lay down quietly for a while, but also goes away, and doesn't imply an inherent character flaw.

From a feminist ideological standpoint, it's still frustrating to admit that my female hormones do sometimes make me uselessly hyper-emotional. But feminism has to reflect the actual experience of living women if anyone can be expected to live by it. I have PMDD, but PMDD doesn't describe what I am any more than a migraine would. When my vagina starts bleeding and my emotions level out, there's a great joy in re-disovering my intellect, my humor, and my "real" self again.

Sometimes Any Publicity Is Good Publicity

2009-09-16T00:47:00.000-05:00

Thank you to Pendard at the Geeky Sex blog for alerting me: Pat Fagan of the Family Research Council just gave a speech to his right-wing base all about polyamory. Of course, very predictably, Christian Evangelical Pat Fagan does not like polyamory; one of his claims is: "In a polemical vein, one could say they 'snatch' children away from their parents and from the culture of monogamy in ways analogous to the Ottoman Turks of the 14th century who raided boys from Christian nations to train them as their own elite warriors, the Janissaries."

I think the youngest person to whom I'm even out as poly is twenty-one, and I don't remember having kidnapped any children lately, but whatever. What thrills me about this speech is: The Family Research Council is helping us with visibility. Because most people have never even imagined the concept that anyone could carry on multiple sexual relationships at the same time honestly.

As I've written here before, more people can wrap their heads around the phrase "open relationship" - but then they make false assumptions about how seriously committed we can be in "open relationships." A massive, massive quantity of Western literature and film has been devoted to the "tragedy" of falling in love with two people and having to decide between them. A massive, massive quantity of Western literature and film depicts people cheating dishonestly, and the "confession" is always a moment of great trauma.

Some popular TV characters like Sex in the City's Samantha went a long way toward popularizing the concept that a woman could have lots of sex partners without yearning to "settle down" - but even then, after Samantha falls in love, the writers dramatically force her to choose either (a) the man she loves, or (b) freedom to have sex with whomever she wants. Points for making "b" a valid option, but did it never occur to the writers of Sex in the City that the two choices aren't inherently mutually exclusive?

It's hard to fight for acceptance and understanding if you have to spend most of the conversation explaining that your lifestyle does, in fact, exist at all. And we have been getting more publicity lately, and thank you to Alan of the Poly in the Media blog for tracking it. We even got an impressively fair article in Newsweek But the Newsweek article still claims, "It's enough to make any monogamist's head spin."

So back to Pat Fagan's speech. I don't know where he picked up the word "polyamory" - because it's pretty clear that he's never researched as far as the Amazon summary of The Ethical Slut to find out what people who identify as polyamorous actually believe. I could pick through his bullet points and refute every one of them, but they're all such absurd oversimplications that it's hardly worth bothering past the first two examples:

"The culture of monogamy is infused from top to bottom with the sacred, in personal, family, community and national life. Worship of God is frequent and assumed. The culture of polyamory tends much more to hide religion, even to suppress it in all things public. It worships God less and demands religion be private."

Some counter-examples include every monogamous couple in which at least one person identifies as atheist, agnostic, or non-observant. Counter-examples on the other side include everyone who has ever agreed with the book Radical Ecstasy, and all the poly Unitarian Universalists and Pagans out there, of which I promise there are many. Also poly Christians, poly Jews, and poly Buddhists.

"The culture of monogamy views freedom as the freedom to be good while for the culture of polyamory freedom views freedom as having no constraints imposed on you."

Actually I think both monogamous and polyamorous people make up their own minds what freedom means to them. But polyamory has lots of constraints: Our bibles like The Ethical Slut and Opening Up have substantial sections on figuring out what kinds of constraints make your relationship feel more secure. Instead of the undiscussed assumption that our partner just won't touch another person, we have to specifically discuss what acts are okay with what people, in what circumstances, and with what safer-sex practices - and whether we need to be consulted first, or if we need our partner to come home to us afterward, or if a particular toy is not to be used with anyone else, or whatever makes people feel safer. I have constrained my husband not to call anyone else by my term-of-endearment. We're not totally anti-constraint; we just like them customized.

Fagan also somehow reached the conclusion that, "State controlled programs today in developed countries, almost universally, are polyamorous-friendly and monogamy-hostile." Which particularly baffles me, because all Western marriage laws are written for couples. Even same-sex legal marriages, civil unions, and domestic partnerships are limited to two people. What government programs are hostile to monogamy?! And if there are any protecting polyamory, I'd love to hear about them. It was only 2003 that the Supreme Court decided by a 6-3 split that police are no longer allowed to break into people's homes and arrest them for consensual, adult anal sex.

So Pat Fagan doesn't know what he's talking about when he mentions polyamory or monogamy, and maybe he's never used Google. He has separated the entire world into exactly two amazingly narrow lifestyles, tossed out everyone who doesn't conform exactly to one or the other, and fantasized some arbitrary delusions to round it out. But! However vague and absurd his understanding of loving multiple people may be, he is spreading the message that such a thing is possible. And for that, I thank him.

Mike Duvall's Family Values

2009-09-14T11:36:00.000-05:00

By now on the blogosphere, Mike Duvall is becoming old news. But to re-cap for anyone who missed it, California state assemblyman Duvall is the most recent "family values" man to get caught on tape at a session of the legislature bragging about his kinky affairs with two different women - including at least one energy lobbyist.

It makes a good news story because it's explicitly sexy; it gives media sources like CBS an excuse to print: "She wears little eye-patch underwear, so I can see her eye patches. So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And so, we had made love Wednesday, a lot. And so she'll she's all, I am going up and down the stairs and you're dripping out of me." But while the country gets off on voyeurism of one California assemblyman, what's legitimately disgusting about him is his voting record. Even now, after the scandal, you can read on his dispatch to constituents: "As a supporter of Prop 8, I will be among the state legislators committed to defending California voters' definition of marriage." He has 100% approval ratings from the California Republican Assembly - whose website touts on the "What We Believe" page: " We believe that the traditional American family, defined as any persons related by blood, marriage of a man and a woman and/or adoption, is the cornerstone of our American society, and the government is duty bound to protect the integrity of the family unit through legislation and taxation policies," and from the Capitol Resource Institute - which issues official statements like, "All students should be safe at school, but promoting safety and promoting multisexuality are not actually the same thing." (Maybe no one has ever told them about the prevalence of peer violence against gay and transgendered teens. But I doubt it.)

So Duvall's a hypocrite. But the crazy thing is, haven't we seen this before? Like, a lot? The Capitol Resource Institute's website has issued a statement: "Assemblyman Michael Duvall... has been the focus of much media attention in the last 24 hours based on revelations of apparent extramarital affairs. In many of these stories, Capitol Resource Institute was cited as giving Assemblyman Duvall high marks for his pro-family voting record. It is always disappointing when a champion of traditional values does not practice the same in his private life..."

In no particular order, the list of their disappointments would include: Mark Sanford. Larry Craig. Bristol Palin - who won't be marrying Levi Johnston after all. Bob Allen. Ted Haggard. John Ensign. David Vitter. Eliot Spitzer. Chip Pickering. Vito Fossella. Paul Stanley.

Just how many examples do we need before this constitutes a trend? With such an impressive track-record of hypocrisy, and the scandals becoming cliché, why do the people who vote for "family values" trust any of the "family values" politicians? They love to argue that sex should be legally restricted to heterosexual monogamous marriages - but they can't follow it themselves. And logically, if the "family values" movement can't uphold what it calls "family values" (mostly: intolerance and mandated ignorance), how do they expect to criminalize the rest of us for at least being honest? If there were anything "natural" or "traditional" about restricting sex to heterosexual monogamous marriages, wouldn't it be easier for the movement's leaders to actually live that way?

Half the news stories about Mike Duvall specifically quote him as saying, "So, I am getting into spanking her. Yeah, I like it. I like spanking her. She goes, 'I know you like spanking me.' I said, 'Yeah! Because you're such a bad girl!'" And personally, I think, okay, so the line's preetty cheesy. When my lovers and friends spank me, I generally prefer being called a "slut" or a "whore" - because I find it hard to take the phrase "bad girl" seriously. But to each their own, right?

So I'm reminded of a particularly good column from the Savage Love archives, in which a reader responded to the Larry Craig scandal with concern that anyone at all would be arrested for hitting on other men. To which Dan Savage responded: "There were complaints about that particular bathroom at the Minneapolis airport, and the police did what the police are supposed to do when there are complaints—they responded... It wouldn't be a career-destroying event for an out gay man today—like, say, a George Michael. It would, however, be career destroying for gay-bashing, straight-identified hypocrites like, say, Senator Craig."

Won't it be an exciting day when the people who vote for these hypocrites notice this pattern of hypocrisy so egregious that even the Capitol Resource Institute has to acknowledge it?

Personal-Boundary Stories

2009-09-08T01:49:00.000-05:00

Something that happened to me a few days ago got me thinking about personal-space boundaries - both in the BDSM community and in everyday life.

I was on a busy train platform, reading a book and waiting for my husband to meet me to get on the train, when a stranger approached me and said, "Hello, I'm new here and looking to make friends." I looked up, mildly annoyed, thinking he might have better luck if he were not interrupting people, perhaps somewhere more conducive to conversation than a busy train station. After an awkward silence, he added, "I'm gay" - I'm guessing to clarify that he wasn't trying to hit on me.

"I'm waiting for someone," I answered.

"Oh," he said, looking disappointed. "Well, if they don't show up, then maybe you and I could go somewhere instead," and he put his arm around my shoulders.

"No!" I said, loudly and clearly, and pushed him off of me.

He looked hurt and repeated, "I'm just looking to make friends" - and reached out to stroke my arm. At which point I panicked and ran out of the train station, and took several long minutes of deep breaths before regaining the courage to go back to see if my husband had gotten there yet.

So less than ten minutes later, the stranger was gone, and I told the story to my husband to explain why I was acting hyper-anxious. And already, even five minutes later, I realized that maybe I had overreacted. I probably hadn't been in any physical danger; the guy was just lonely. But the fact remains: He touched me, I pushed him and said "No," and he tried to touch me again. Non-sexual, non-violent, but it still took a good half hour before my breathing and heart-rate calmed entirely back to normal.

And I thought for a split-second: Maybe it's ironic that I would be so sensitive to this, given how much of the last five years I've spent at BDSM parties being spanked by people I barely know. Except, I realized immediately: No, it isn't at all ironic. Because in the BDSM community, we fetishize consent and communication above all else. Respectful communication and consent are the doctrines that make what we do okay; they are absolutely central to our subculture.

About a year and a half ago, I was at a particular party at a BDSM convention to which tickets had been sold on the Internet, and watching everyone else's scenes was making me horny. But I only had one partner in town, and he was playing with someone else, and I wasn't in the mood to seek out anything casual. So, with some self-empowered inspiration, I went to a corner to tie myself up and masturbate. And as I was doing so, an unattractive man I didn't know pulled up a chair about five or ten feet away to watch me. Which initially repulsed me. But as I thought about what to say to him, I realized that I had of course been aware that I was in a room crowded with other kinky people playing, and if I really wanted to masturbate in private, I could easily do that in my private hotel room. Which I considered leaving for. But honestly, I was at the party because I'm an exhibitionist. My problem with this particular person watching was not that I mind strangers watching, but that this stranger was older, unattractive, and wearing a silly T-shirt. He stayed at a distance well outside arm's length, and stayed silent. So after a while, I closed my eyes, tied a length of rope around my head to keep them closed, and tried to forget about him. It occurred to me that if he did by some chance come any closer, I could yell out a safeword and a dozen trusted friends would come running. ....But he didn't, and I got into my blindfolded masturbation with the sounds of other people's pain and pleasure around me, and I had a fabulous orgasm.

When I opened my eyes again, I was surprised to see the same man still sitting there. But he never made eye contact or approached me. I simply finished untying myself and walked away to see how my partner's scene was going. I didn't want that man to touch me: So I didn't invite him to, so he didn't. And it really was that simple.

The BDSM community has successfully created these spaces where everyone, no matter how outrageously publicly sexual, has the right to not be touched without prior communication and consent. I wish that more people in train stations were so respectful.

Bridezilla and Back from the Dead

2009-08-18T19:12:00.000-05:00

Now that I am so close to being legally married and starting to get my life back (i.e. writing again), I would like to address the great archetype of Bridezilla. Because for the over-a-year that I've been engaged, people have loved to tell me Bridezilla stories, or ask me whether I've "yet" become Bridezilla. Bridezillas are on reality TV all day and all night, seven days a week. And yes, obviously, the ubiquitous TV brides sobbing and shrieking at their closest loved are easy to despise, which makes them great for reality-TV. But what the producers of those shows don't often admit is that most of these women have spent the last year of their lives listening to sexist, heterosexist stories about Bridezilla, repeating again and again that all women really want to be is a princess-bride, and all princess-brides are crazy. Self-fulfilled prophecy, anyone?

I have never been especially femme. I never gave a single thought to my "ideal wedding" until faced with trying to schedule one. I asked close friends and my boyfriend to be attendants because I cherish their support, but I flatly refused to tell anyone else what to wear. At the trial run for my hair, the hairdresser asked me how easily my hair holds a curl, and I realized that there isn't a single previous life experience from which I would know the answer to that question. I was lucky to fall in love with a man with a great talent for visual design, and he made most of our style choices - a responsibility that I was thrilled to bequeath to him.

Except, when my fiancé made phone calls to arrange some of those logistics, a common first question to him was, "And what does the bride want?" Friends who know us well find this funny, because he is definitely the designer in our relationship. Friends who don't know us quite as well were more confused as to why such an opener surprised us. Clearly, our culture tells us, weddings are for brides. I am overwhelmed by the number of books, magazines, and websites with "bridal" advice. What is the adjective form of "groom"? Is there one? Apparently, the groom's proscribed role is to show up. And for women who have rejected such rigid gender roles, who have never before cared about formal etiquette or flower arrangements or color schemes, suddenly there's a great deal of pressure to learn and to care. While people resent "Bridezilla," they are also shocked and uncomfortable with a bride that refuses to play along sufficiently with the "princess" motif. Then, lo and behold, after a year of sexist, heterosexist repetitions that this is the single most important day of my life and that I should have perfect control, added to the months of lacking time for anything else that used to be my life, I have definitely found myself going crazy.

For all my fiancé and I have joked this past year about eloping, and all the sleepless nights and panic attacks about how much everyone expected me to do - I am now really, really excited that I'm about to have the largest, most varied assembly of my family and friends that I am likely to see in this lifetime. The details are coming together and it's going to be beautiful. And I am really, really excited to spend the rest of my life with my fiancé, who has been my rock of stability during this period of insanity - which bodes excellently for our marriage. I really do believe in celebrating romantic love with beloved friends and family. And if I hear one more "Bridezilla" reference, I will scream.

A Virgin by Any Other Name

2009-06-21T10:46:00.000-05:00

Rabbitwhite's recent and excellent post concerning the lost of her virginity and Evil Slut Clique's recent and excellent post about 'The Secret Life of the American Teenager got me thinking about my own loss-of-virginity story. Except: At the time I had a much narrower view of what constituted virginity, because I had a much narrower view of what constituted sex. In the days of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, I was only fourteen years old and very much a virgin. I remember even then being profoundly confused why so many people cared about President Clinton's penis, but also confused by the consuming quasi-political public debate over whether or not oral sex was "really" sex. At fourteen, I was quite sure that it wasn't. All of my sex education focused on a man putting his penis in a woman's vagina. It led to babies. And, I knew at fourteen, gay people did something like putting-a-penis-in-a-vagina, except that there were either two penises or two vaginas, and I believed in sociopolitical equality but couldn't visualize the logistics of how that worked.

The first time I kissed someone on the lips, I was thirteen, and my family was about to move across the country. I overcame my shyness by telling myself that I'd never see the cute boy again, and I asked him if he would kiss me goodbye. He said yes, and then he closed his eyes and sort of puckered his lips. (He was also thirteen, and probably didn't know what he was doing either.) I remember the clear thought process of expectation that I was supposed to close my eyes, too - and then thinking, No way! I'm finally going to kiss a boy! I'm going to watch this!

And so began my struggle to reconcile being a good girl with really, really wanted to make out with the boys. (And maybe every once in a while with a girl, although fewer of them, and I had no precedent for how that was supposed to work - especially if I still liked boys too much to identify myself as a lesbian.) The myth that messed me up the most was that most boys only want sex, so slutty girls who gave it to them too easily were tools of the patriarchy, and fated for heartbreak along with the unwanted pregnancies and STD's. The solution, I decided as a teenager, was to save sex for True Love (TM), and to imagine True Love (TM) as maudlin-romantically as only a very naive teenager can imagine True Love (TM).

The first time kissing led to taking off my clothes, I was almost sixteen, and I decided that since kissing naked was such overwhelming pleasure, then I must have found my True Love (TM). I wanted to give him a blowjob, but I hadn't yet learned how to hold my lips over my teeth for it, so I accidentally bit him a couple times and he tactfully asked me to stop. He never licked my pussy in return, which didn't yet strike me as unfair, because pussies smelled funny. He did put a finger or two in me, and that was as good as finding God.

Six months later I felt ready to offer him my virginity (by which I specifically meant penis-in-vagina), but first he broke up with me on the grounds that I was too emotional and clingy. At the time, of course, I was devastated, but in retrospect he had an excellent point. I pined for an embarrassingly long time, because the naked touching had been really, really good, and I had believed so strongly the myth that women don't enjoy naked touching without True Love (TM). Besides the myth that a person only gets one True Love (TM). ...As I came to terms with the fact that he wouldn't return my phone calls and thus probably wasn't my One True Love (TM), I had to adjust my assumption that True Love (TM) was necessary to really, really enjoying naked touching. I decided that what we had done was just making out, and that sex was what I should save for the unknown One True Love (TM). ...Then it followed that I could make out with just about anyone. And I did. I spent a lot of my junior and senior years of high school traveling, and I always had the best luck with boys that I thought I'd never see again, and vice versa. Although, for having known them each a very short time, I still vividly and fondly remember names and stories attached to various hand jobs and blow jobs. The first person to give me a blow job was only around for two weeks, but it was a great blow job. (We haven't really spoken since, but now we're Facebook-friends.) And I never doubted afterward that I was still a virgin, awaiting True Love (TM).

And then, after all that build-up: My first experience with penis-in-vagina sex - when I was eighteen and in madly love for the second time - was totally anti-climactic, in every sense of the word. I was definitely an initiative-taking participant and not violated in any way, and I was so sure that I was back in True Love (TM). But my hymen tearing hurt like a bitch. For at least a month, I felt baffled that anyone would prefer that awkward pain over hand jobs or oral sex. ...Many years of sexual self-discovery later, I'm now a huge fan of having a cock in my cunt. But then, I'm also still a fan of oral sex, and petting, and pegging, which can all lead to equally intense orgasms. And I still don't have as much experience with women, but I have successfully figured out how one has sex without a penis at all. Not to mention BDSM: Every now and then a good ass-beating is better than touching genitals at all.

So in retrospect, the emotional importance I once attached to penis-in-vagina sex - and not to other forms of sexuality - was entirely arbitrary, and contingent on not knowing what I was missing.

Which is not to say that I regret it. It worked for me at the time, both for my pleasure and for my newly-forming sexual morality. It was also safer from a pregnancy/STD-prevention perspective. (Although at the time I also didn't understand that STD's could also be passed by oral sex. I lucked out.)

But it does continue to baffle me when I hear abstinence-propaganda and its contribution to a cultural obsession with virginity. Only the most fringe extremists oppose premarital kissing, so who gets to determine the point on the spectrum at which virginity is lost? And if when that moment passes is up for debate, then how do they pass moral proclamations over clear-cut categories of virgins and non-virgins? For those who have had the experiences, was first intercourse really more life-changing than first kiss, or first petting?

Stormy Daniels for Senate

2009-06-16T19:39:00.000-05:00

I have to admit that I've seen relatively little vanilla pornography, so the first I heard of porn star Stormy Daniels is that she may be running for U.S. Senate in 2010. Specifically, as Ms. Daniels is from Louisiana, she would be challenging the incumbent Republican senator David Vitter - one of the cliché right-wing politicians who get caught doing the very things they love to legislate against. In the summer of 2007 news broke that before, during, and after winning a U.S. senate seat by preaching conservative "family values," Vitter was a frequent customer of prostitutes. And he was a fetishist: It's hard now to find a mainstream reputable source from 2007, but some of the prostitutes who had slept with Sen. Vitter disclosed that he liked being forced to wear diapers. Which is how he earned his nickname: Vitter the Shitter.

Now, I firmly believe that Senator Vitter has the right to wear diapers with consenting prostitutes, and that doing so doesn't necessarily compromise his abilities as a senator - any more than my kinks or polyamory compromise my ability to do a desk job during the day, or any more than anybody having vanilla sex with their spouse compromises their ability to do a job. Except that apparently Senator Vitter actually disagrees with me, because after he was caught, he went on the record calling his own behavior, 'a very serious sin.' And he's still voting with the Christian Coalition 100% of the time.

In our culture, it's easy to laugh with disgust at diaper-fetishists. But I'm really disgusted he has claimed that stopping gay marriage is the most important issue in America, and I'm frustrated that the jokes at his expense generally target his fetish and not the hypocrisy of his trademark sexual intolerance.

Enter Stormy Daniels, porn star, and her blitz of interviews in the mainstream media - on MSNBC, on CNN, and even on Fox News, and noted by Rachel Maddow as 'the [challenger] to receive the most press attention thus far.' And no one seems to know how seriously to take her: On the one hand, her campaign is likely getting attention for the sheer novelty, and she doesn't really get defensive when interviewers ask for a reaction to the idea that this is a big joke. But on the other hand, she's getting plenty of real attention. And - in a country where both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse "The Body" Ventura have been elected as governors - novelty, fame, sex appeal obviously count for something.

And, as a sex-positive feminist, I almost love her for parts of her interview with The Daily Beast's Max Blumenthal:

Particularly when she says, as part of what could be an actual U.S. Senate campaign, "I personally have no issues with [Vitter]'s sexual activities or his sexual preferences or whatever it is that he wants to do. My issue with him - I mean, who am I to judge, right? My issue with him is that he's a hypocrite. And, you know, call me what you will, but you can't call me a hypocrite." Or when she suggests the campaign slogan, "Stormy Daniels: Screwing people honestly."

Except - and this is a real problem - she has no political experience of any kind. Which she freely admits in all of these interviews. The fan site that apparently convinced her to run lists her credentials from editing her high school newspaper to her acting role in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Which is not to discount the idea that she may well be a smart woman with good business sense; she comes across in her interviews as reasonably articulate. But the U.S. only has 100 senators out of our entire population, and I would hope that we hold them to higher standards than "reasonably articulate." I generally respect the values and the intelligence of most of my family and friends, but I don't believe that we're all qualified for the office of Senate.

So, as someone who pragmatically prefers our senators to come with strong leadership resumés, I sincerely hope that this is a publicity stunt and not an actual political campaign. But it's a beautiful publicity stunt. While I wouldn't want her to win, I love her for touring the mainstream media with the message that the honest sex-worker is more ethical than the guy with a 100% rating from the Christian Coalition. I love her for her humility and political-participation-advocacy when she tells The Daily Beast, "If he's so awful that they're trying to get me to run, I think people really need to get out there and vote. And if I can use my name and my image to bring attention to the fact that people need to register to vote, and get people like Vitter out of office..."

....And then my admiration comes to screeching halt with her slogan suggestion, "Stormy Daniels: At Least I Don't Wear a Diaper." Which is such an easy blow to take, which offends so very few people. But is mocking other people's fetishes so acceptable that even a porn star campaigning for senate gets to do it? I don't personally understand the sexual kick of diapers, but it doesn't hurt me. If we're going to take blows at Senator Vitter: Legislating against my civil rights hurts me.

So maybe this political race isn't a story of sexual liberation after all, but rather another example of our culture's wacky bipolar attitude toward sex. We carry the shame that got Vitter elected in the first place, and heap more shame on Vitter for his scandal. But then the media laps at the feet of the traditionally-beautiful big-breasted blond porn star. And we'll never know for sure whether or not Stormy Daniels actually has any good ideas on the issues, because interviewers only ask her about pornography or her opponent's prostitute-habit. Sex sells - and apparently so does shame.

Secrets and Sophistication

2009-06-14T13:00:00.000-05:00

As I've been reflecting on my discovery of the BDSM community: I have no doubt that there are many people who practice BDSM behind closed door with their lovers and who consider their proclivities a deeply private matter - and who are perfectly happy doing so. One doesn't need to join the BDSM social community, or to discuss it with platonic friends (or with strangers on the Internet), in order to be ethical, self-aware, and kinky as all hell. But personally, I remember having a deep, dark, shameful secret. And telling my "secret" to trusted friends - whom I had no desire to fuck or play with - was the key to no longer having a secret. (I'm also lucky in that I've always been politically liberal, and already had liberal friends.)

My very closest friends, the ones I told first, got a nervously chattery version that started with, "I have a deep dark secret that I have to get off my chest." Actually, one of my very first disclosures started with a ramble about how very stressed I was about college midterms and a theatre-piece that I was working on at the time, before I got the courage to toss in the stress of my deep dark secret, and conclude with, "Or maybe I'm just entirely crazy."

To which my friend responded perfectly, "Liking sadomasochism doesn't mean you're crazy. Although sacrificing your health and sleep over a school play might mean you're crazy."

Then there was my cousin, whom I had never really intended to tell. But I met the man that I'm (now, four and a half years later) going to marry at a munch, and I did tell my family that I was dating someone that I had met in a coffee-shop . My cousin and I have always talked more openly about sex with each other, and she wanted to know all the details about how my now-fiancé and I started talking to each other. Her questions were inescapably specific, and I had never withheld the details about any other boyfriend from her before, so I had the uncomfortable choice between explaining the munch or lying to her. Finally, after a lot of obnoxiously cryptic mumblings, I said the word "sadomasochism."

"Sadomasochism? What's that?" And we had a long terrifying pause, in which I grappled for how to explain sadomasochism to my younger cousin. Then she rescued me by asking, "Wait, to do you mean S&M?"

"Uh, yes. That's what S&M stands for."

"Oh, I never knew what it stood for. You sound so sophisticated!"

And then the friend I couldn't tell for a while because our schedules made it difficult to spend one-on-time together. She met "the man from the coffee-shop" before I'd had an opportunity to elucidate why I had been talking to strangers in that coffee-shop. While the three of us were sitting on my couch together one evening, he picked up the bit of rope I had laying around as a cat toy and started fidgeting. My friend, an artistic girl, noticed and exclaimed what very pretty knots he was making, and asked him to teach her. Before leaving, she announced that she was going to start making jewelry with these beautiful knots - and, "Who knew knots could be so useful?!" Several days later, when I told her that he and I were both sadomasochists, her response was, "What, you mean like tying people up and stuff? ...Oh! He was never a boy scout, was he?!" and laughed.

So, why did I have a deep, dark secret from these people for so long? ...I honestly have no idea.

The Mary Kay Epilogue

2009-06-05T10:01:00.000-05:00

I love Susie Bright. I first discovered her essays when I was in college, and I give her a lot of credit for my college epiphany that being a feminist and being a slut were not, after all mutually exclusive: That not only could I be an empowered woman and a masochist cock-craver, but that I could only become an empowered woman if I let go of the shame for my honest sexual desires. Thank you Susie Bright. I still follow her blog eagerly, although most of the time now it makes me feel like her proverbial preacher's choir.

Then, a couple weeks ago, Susie Bright covered the current whereabouts of Mary Kay Fualaau, better known to people who had access to television in the 1990's as Mary Kay Letourneau. For those who don't remember, Mary Kay Letourneau was imprisoned in 1997 for having sex with and becoming impregnated by her thirteen-year-old student, Vili Fualaau. She was released in January 1998, but by February she went back to jail for planning to run away with boy, and that October she gave birth to their second child. In 2001, Vili Fualaau's mother sued the school and police for failing to keep her son safe, but she lost: Police attorney Anne Bremner successfully convinced a jury, "Fualaau and Letourneau still 'see themselves as Romeo and Juliet' and want to get married... adding that there was nothing anyone could have done to keep the two apart." Letourneau finished her second jail sentence in 2004, at which point Fualaau, then 21, successfully petitioned the court to let him see her again. They married in 2005, in a ceremony covered by Entertainment Tonight. And now they have celebrated their fourth marriage anniversary, and host an event in a Seattle bar called "Hot for Teacher."

....And I have been struggling to figure out how I feel about this. Once again, I think Susie Bright sums it up about as well as anyone can:

"It's unfair to strike a moral posture on The Letourneau Affair, because their story defies all predictions."

On the one hand, the basis of any ethical sexuality is informed consent, and in 1997 Vili Fualaau was not sufficiently mature to give informed consent to a thirtysomething authority figure. ...On the other hand, Vili Fualaau is a consenting adult now. If their relationship was (rightfully!) criminal in 1997, but they're two consenting adults in 2009, then when did the ethics change?

On the one hand, one could argue that Vili's ongoing attachment to the woman who statutorily raped him is a further sign of his psychological damage. ....On the other hand, what outsider has the right to tell him, now almost 26, that he still doesn't have the right to choose his wife-of-four-years?

On the one hand, the eighteenth birthday is a completely arbitrary cut-off by which to judge sexual maturity. Any cut-off would be arbitrary, because "growing up" is a gradual process, and because people psychologically "grow up" at different ages. ...On the other hand, there's a cut-off somewhere, and it's definitely after the seventh grade.

On the one hand, realistically, most thirteen-year-olds daydream about sex and masturbate all the time; heaven knows I did. ...On the other hand, those daydreams and masturbation are all about figuring out how one's own body works sexually, before one shares that with another person.

On the one hand, our culture's hysteria about the perceived omnipresent threat of pedophiles has gotten a little, well, hysterical - with parents getting arrested for taking naked-baby pictures that are sexual only in the eyes of the prosecutors, and teenagers being arrested for taking sexy pictures of themselves. ...On the other hand, other people's paranoia of pornography aside, Mary Kay bore two of Vili's children.

The whole story is built-for-TV sensationalism, but I keep picking at it in my brain. And one part on which I feel comfortable making a definitive moral proclamation: Why weren't they using birth control?! I support jail sentences for thirtysomethings who have sex with their seventh grade students, but then to not use birth control - twice - is a whole extra layer of stupid. Is that how far safe-sex awareness has fallen?

What I Learned from the Gay Puppies

2009-05-31T22:56:00.000-05:00

This past Memorial Day, Chicago hosted International Mr. Leather, a long-weekend festival and pageant for the gay-male BDSM community, which has already been written up by Dan Savage and by my partner over at the Geeky Sex blog. I have written of my fondness for puppy play before on this blog, but I had never been around many human-puppies. The concept was too enticing to pass up.

But beforehand, sitting in a bar with my fiancé and our friend, I realized that I was feeling socially anxious in a way that I haven't felt about play parties for a while now. Because I had never before been to a sexy-party where I was so likely to be the only woman present. In sexually-liberated communities, we often like to downplay how fundamentally different we are from people who fall into different categories of sexual liberation. But for all the warm fuzzies of confederacy and label-rejection, I realized over my Irish coffee around the corner from the IML fancy hotel that my tits and long hair still designate my body as unambiguously female, even femme, and it was safe to assume that most of the attendees of a butch-leaning gay men's convention would not find me attractive. I would only know the two people I came with, and at the very least, I was going to look conspicuously different.

And surely enough, in that very crowded hotel I spotted all of two or three other women without hotel-staff badges. But I sucked up my nerves and stripped down to my underwear, carefully folded my street clothes into a satchel, strapped on my knee-pads, and let my fiancé buckle on my collar. Honestly, part of my headspace was still waiting for someone to question what I was doing there. But my fiancé had brought my favorite squeaky monkey toy, and I went through the motions of biting and shaking it. And then I heard a nearby attractive man in a leather thong exclaim to his partner or friend that I was cute. I looked at him, and he smiled, so I crawled over and leaned against his legs. He pat my head and laughed in a welcoming way. And from that point on, I was home.

With my liberal-university-gender-studies background, I'm sure I could draft something very academic-sounding about the cultural variations between the "pansexual" (in practice, mostly straight with bi women) community and the gay community. I could examine the effects on our psyches from homophobia vs. from sexism, from male privilege vs. straight privilege. The pansexual kink community certainly owes a great debt to the gay kink community for initiating and organizing such large-scale projects as IML, not to mention the Leather Archives and Museum. But that night at Woof Camp, as soon as the first stranger pat my head, we were all just friends. The other puppies and I batted around a beach ball for a long idyllic time, and several bipedal men besides my fiancé and our friend grabbed my squeaky monkey toy, threw it, and exclaimed "Good girl!" when I brought it back in my teeth. One even rewarded me with a "treat" from a jar of chocolate puff balls. (Yes, I know that chocolate is bad for dogs. But it never seems to stop them, and I haven't shown any signs of poisoning yet.)

And while I also derive pleasure from gender-studies academia and debate, Woof Camp feels closer to why sexual liberation is a fight worth fighting. In the end, ideally, people of all genders and orientations should just be able to share simple joys like beach balls and chocolate-balls.

(Credit to Northbound Leather for making the tail-brief pictured, as well as a whole line of fantastic leather clothing.)

So why would you get married?

2009-05-27T02:11:00.000-05:00

For the last going-on-three years, my lovers and I have identified as polyamorous. Although I had only learned the word "polyamorous" two years earlier when I found the BDSM community, and I find that most people outside alternate-sexuality communities still haven't heard it. And explaining my whole "weird" philosophy every time both of my lovers come up in conversation gets long-winded and awkwardly personal. So I've discovered that more people recognize the term "open relationship." Not everyone has read The Ethical Slut, but "open relationships" are "normal" enough. I'm in an "open relationship" and then the conversation can move on.

Which was simple enough - until my "primary partner" and I announced that we were going to get married.

(First, I have to admit that I've always disliked the technical sound of the terms "primary" and "secondary" partner. It's nicely convenient that now I can instead differentiate my "fiancé" and my "boyfriend.")

When I first started coming out as poly, the most positive reaction I got from an older relative was that I was very young and that I should enjoy getting to do such "wild" things while I'm still in my twenties: "while I still can." As my romantic love constitutes an adolescent rebellion, which I will surely outgrow. Few of my peer-acquaintances have been so blunt, but I have still picked up comments implying that my "open relationship" must be less serious than a monogamous relationship. After all, the assumption goes, everyone wants to find "The One." "Open relationships" are "normal" enough, sure, but they are temporary phases for people with commitment problems. Then my fiancé and I screwed that assumption by getting engaged. At least a couple friends - to our knowledge - who had previously understood our "open relationship" have asked, "If that's your arrangement, why would you get married?!"

With only this amount of space, I can't possibly answer that question with as much depth or brilliant research as lesbian writer E.J.Graff did in her 2004 book What Is Marriage For? - so I highly recommend reading this book. Most explicitly, E.J.Graff argues that her marriage to another woman deserves legal recognition, which is a point with which I assume most readers of sexgenderbody.com already emphatically agree. Along the way, Graff unfolds the countless ways in which the legal definition and expectations of marriage have radically changed throughout the last couple hundred years of Western history. The phrase "traditional marriage" is meaninglessly vague, with no one historical precedent. Every generation re-inventos the laws and expectations, and every couple re-negotiates from there.

So, given our "open relationship" agreement, why would my fiancé and I get married? I don't think our reasons are all that uncommon, honestly. We've been together for several years, during which both of us have grown and changed significantly, and the changes keep bringing us closer together. We love each other and already enjoy seeing each other every day. Living together feels natural. I love that he's usually the last thing I see when I'm falling asleep and the first thing I see when I'm waking up. I want to spend the rest of my life with him. Then, on the logistical side of spending the rest of my life with him, having a joint bank account makes going out to eat together and paying our housing and utility bills much simpler. When the marriage is legal, we'll get perks on our taxes and potentially a discount on our auto insurance. I also love his family. The children related to him call me "Aunt," and I love knowing that I will still be their aunt twenty years from now, when we'll find out what kind of adults they become. Why else does anyone get married in contemporary America?

To ensure that our spouse never fucks another human being ever again? Is it really shocking or reckless of me to find that less interesting?

After all, one of the the characteristics of my fiancé that makes us so compatible - after our shared sense of humor, shared interests, and shared values - is that neither one of us has the slightest interest in Being Monogamous Forevermore. I suck at monogamy: The only time I've ever tried it for more than a year, I resented it and I cheated kind of a lot. Now that I have figured out what works for me and have two wondrously wonderful, stable men in my life, I have little patience for the idea that I should still aspire to marry monogamously. We are building a marriage on the lifestyle that we are happy living.

"If that's your arrangement, why would you get married?" acquaintances have asked us. Because monogamy is not inherently a criteria of love, or commitment. Because we agree on our definitions of love and commitment. Why does anyone get married?

(And - speaking of arbitrary and offensively restrictive definitions of marriage - what's wrong with this stupid country for not affording gays and lesbians the same legal choice?)

Kink Reality vs. Kink Fantasy

2009-05-20T00:33:00.000-05:00

A little over a week ago, I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Laura Antoniou titled "Too Kinky for Words" - addressing kinks that are considered taboo even among most of the BDSM community. Specifically, at the very beginning, she had every single person present write anonymously on a slip of paper our most taboo sexual fantasy - one we've never acted out, one that frightens or shames us. Then she collected all the papers, and spent the next hour and a half reading every one of them aloud and, anonymously, making fun of every person in the room. With an explanation about how laughter liberates us from fear, be it fear of judgment or fear of our own darkness.

After hearing so different people's "taboo" fantasies - however they defined "taboo" - the questions I've been carrying for the last week concern how we discern between fantasies we can and should act out, and the fantasies that we really can't or shouldn't.

At the beginning of the spectrum, there are the kinks that are the first examples most people think of when they hear the term "kinky": your wrist-cuffs, your spankings and canes and paddles, your blindfolds, your uniforms or leather or high-heeled shoes, your threesomes. Certainly, a large segment of society still feels greater embarrassment asking a partner to engage in anything "kinky" than they would feel asking a sexual partner to engage in, say, oral sex. (Although in the 1950's oral sex was pretty kinky too - but that's a different article for another time.) There's a reason that the fetishes listed above form a basis of the "kinky" stereotypes: because they're pretty common, and mostly safe. Finding someone who enthusiastically consents to being spanked is not especially difficult. If you have a hard time telling partners about common fetishes, I recommend reading Dan Savage's column or listening to his podcast. The sex-positive movement is all about liberating people who want to actually play with wrist-cuffs or spanking or leather. Have at it.

But then there are the sexual fantasies that we actually can't act out - such as those that feature vampires, advanced robots, or supernatural powers. And the sexual fantasies that we actually shouldn't act out - such as non-consent, pedophilia, or the extremely dangerous. And for those categories, there is fantasy. No matter how much the thought turns you on, you will probably never be bitten by an immortal being, and it will never under any circumstances be ethical to play with a literal child. But a sexually adventurous adult partner may be perfectly happy to put on a costume and pretend to be whomever or whatever you like. Most sane kinksters will not consent to playing with a loaded gun, but more may consider consenting to play-pretend with a fake prop-gun. Every BDSM scene ethically necessitates the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality: We only pretend that the bottom has no control. With costumes and further theatrical make-believe, almost anything imaginable can plausibly be acted out ethically. The next steps are to find a self-empowered adult who wants to pretend with you, and to jointly research, discuss, and mitigate any safety risks to everyone's fully-informed comfort level.

But some fantasies work better as fantasies. For example, gang-bangs are a relatively common fantasy in the straight BDSM community. But in practice, straight-identified men often have a difficult time maintaining erections while waiting around a lot of other straight-identified men. Which is why there are fluffers and dildoes; such "problems" do not destroy the possibilities. But before bringing a fantasy into literal or even play-pretend reality, it's good to remember that reality is often messier and less predictable than the fantasy. And as a friend of mine likes to say, once a fantasy scene goes wrong, then the fantasy isn't good for masturbation anymore. Some fantasies really are more fun when they're only fantasies: when they can be controlled and perfect and cherished as ours alone.

There is some stigma to anything labelled "only a fantasy." And of course, people who express their fantasies as reality are usually ridiculous and/or creepy. But as long as we can discern accurately between fantasy and reality, I say we should celebrate fantasies and fiction and their astonishing power to move us emotionally or to enhance our orgasms. Only when we appreciate the inherent value of our fantasies can we intelligibly negotiate which to act out and which to leave as fiction.

Where are all the poly writers?

2009-05-12T10:25:00.000-05:00

Last week I attended a polyamory book club meeting to discuss All My Love, a play running in Chicago that will have closed by the time this article is published. Of course, all of us in the poly book club were thrilled to see a play with poly characters. Our organizer, Cunning Minx, also interviewed the playwright and actor Tony Fiorentino, and published it on her podcast, Polyamory Weekly. (Which podcast I highly recommend in general, and thank you Minx.)

But early in the meeting, we determined something funny about the poly book club discussing this play: The play showed a deeply cynical view of polyamory. And yet there we were, about a dozen active polyamorists, discussing it for three hours.

Now that the play has closed, this review will contain spoilers. Yes, the central character is a woman who claims polyamory as an integral facet of her identity, and she has two boyfriends, and she is a sympathetic character. But one of her boyfriends makes it very clear that he hates polyamory and is barely, painfully sucking it up to avoid losing the girl - and the other boyfriend turns out to be lying to his wife about very important things. Throw in our "heroine's" deeply disturbed teenage daughters and her metamour's infertility, and these characters spend most of their lives screaming and/or crying. New layers of dishonesty and heartbreak are revealed in every scene.

And as a polyamorist, that frustrated me to no end. ...Until someone else at the book club pointed out from Minx's interview with Tony Fiorentino that Mr. Fiorentino is not himself polyamorous, and he never intended to create converts. To quote him from Minx's podcast: "I was actually researching stuff for my previous play... and just came across the word 'polyamory' and started reading a little bit about it, and I thought... It would also make a great play, because... when you put a couple of people together who do not share the same ideologies but they happen to be in love, you have the seed of what could be a play with a lot of conflict." And there is nothing in that with which I can argue. Mr. Fiorentino is not obligated as a playwright to be our spokesman. And there's nothing untruthful about the implication that some individuals practice polyamory badly. Some individuals in his play also practice monogamy badly. We are all flawed, and melodrama ensues. Then a statutorily-raped teenager attempts suicide on prom night, and far worse melodrama ensues. That much is realistic enough.

No artist should be expected to speak for an entire community, especially if the artist's familiarity with the community is only from books. The unfortunate part is that plays like this do end up speaking for the entire community, because there are so very few artists saying the word "polyamory" at all - and none with any more fame or attention. Reviewer Alan Breslof called the play "educational." The depressed teenagers get at least as much dramatic stage-time as their polyamorous mother, but all the reviews focus on the novelty of polyamory. Fiorentino himself apparently had never heard of the concept until shortly before he decided to write the play. Whether anyone likes it or not, the play did create first impressions for a lot of its audience.

So why isn't anyone else producing poly fiction that's less cynical or tragic? I've heard the argument that good stories require a conflict, but Western writers seem to have an easy enough time writing romantically for monogamy. Hollywood and Broadway and bestseller book-lists have fed us plenty of emotionally engaging stories about couples in love. Where are our poly romantic comedies? Where are our stories about people in functional poly relationships battling external conflicts? Twenty years after the publication of Heather Has Two Mommies, where's the book for Heather's classmate with three?

Reflections on Puppy Play

2009-05-09T02:58:00.000-05:00

I originally went hunting for the BDSM community because I knew I wanted more impact play in my life. But as soon as I starting meeting other kinky people, my world burst forth with possibilities of kinks I'd never heard of to consider. One of the more intriguing of which was puppy play.

Most practitioners of puppy play feel it as an expression of power play: the submissive puppy and the dominant owner or trainer. Puppy play also lends itself as an excuse to design and to wear some fabulously imaginative fetish gear, made by top-brand fetish outfitters such as Mr. S, JT's Stockroom (pictured mitts), and Northbound Leather.

But honestly, when I first heard of kinky people pretending to be puppies, my first reaction was a flashback to being a little girl and fighting with other girls who wanted to play "House" but didn't want to let me play the dog. My grandfather was a veterinarian; my parents brought home my first dog when I was three; and strange dogs greet me enthusiastically as a friend in a way that strange humans don't. When I was young enough to play make-believe without raising anyone's eyebrows, my closest friends and I spent plenty of time on our hands and knees barking at each other. For me, it was a lot more fun than pretending that some doll was a baby. And now, as an adult, my more vivid memories of play-pretend still delight me.

I write this with some apprehension of unintentionally offending people who get off on the dominant/submissive expression of training, or by puppy fetish-wear. But personally, I'm not particularly submissive; I rarely find taking orders as gratifying as telling a top to "make me." Without training, I'm still attracted to puppy play for the same reasons that I liked pretending to be a puppy as a little girl: Because it's a little bit silly and a lot of fun. Puppies have joyous priorities: 1. Food. 2. Physical affection. 3. Playing. 4. Sleeping. Fifteen years after puberty, I re-discovered these simple joys. For some, it's erotic. For me, it's an excuse to spend some time naked, hump my fiancé's leg, bite, and eat "treats" (usually chocolate-covered espresso beans) without using my hands. It is entirely silly, and, to some degree, that's the point. It makes me happy - much like watching the movie Clue over and over again make me happy.

A couple years ago at the New York Leather Street Fest, I met a gay man on his hands and skateboard-padded knees, leashed to his master and panting. I smiled at them, and the human-dog scampered over and nuzzled himself against my legs. I never got either of their names, but I spent a lovely while playing fetch, rubbing his belly, and chatting with his master. We didn't know each other, and we weren't interested in each other sexually, but him playing a "puppy" freed us to play together.

This being my perspective, one could argue that puppy play isn't "really" my kink. Which comes down to semantics of whether or not "kinks" must be explicitly sexual. If so, then this article may be off-topic for this blog.

But there is something about kink that ends up liberating one to hedonism, sexy or not. At BDSM play parties, no one really reacts if I shed all my clothes and crawl around the floor with a squeaky-monkey toy in my mouth. Where else in the world would that be true? There is no rational explanation for a grown woman to find so much joy in a squeaky-monkey toy. But then, not coincidentally, I gave up rationally explaining myself around the same time I embraced the eroticism of having my ass beaten. Sexuality is not rational. And so, when we embrace our unique sexuality, we liberate ourselves from the duty to rationally explain ourselves. Sometimes the reward is orgasms, and sometimes it's just fun.

Different Loving

2009-05-02T22:52:00.000-05:00

Over a year passed between the time I realized clearly that I am a masochist and the time that I found the BDSM community, with its social coffee gatherings and open-to-the-public play parties. It was a lonely year between my junior and senior years of college, during which I wasted entirely too much mental energy wondering if I was crazy. It did sound irreconcilable to be a sane, empowered woman and also really like men hitting me and/or calling me a whore. After a bad reaction from my college boyfriend, it took me a year to confess my "big dark secret" to a second person.

But in hindsight, blaming the college boyfriend was mostly a convenient excuse for my own confusion. Alternative sexuality scares a lot of people. I had to do a lot of reading and a lot of introspection on my own before becoming the sort of confidant woman who writes columns about BDSM for the world wide web.

Fortunately, I found Yes Means Yes by Kath Albury in my local feminist bookstore, which first introduced me to the idea that there's a kinky community. ...At least in New York City, home of The Eulenspiegel Society, and in San Francisco, home of the Society of Janus. Right, of course, sexually liberated people congregate in New York City and San Francisco. Unfortunately I live far from either coast, and at the time I had a year and a half of college left before I would have had an option of moving. Still, the awareness that the community exists was thrilling evidence against the notion that I'm just crazy - even if geography was working against me.

Knowing what I know now, the next stop should have been the Internet. I can't explain why it wasn't; over the last decade, most social organization has moved to cyberspace. Sadomasochists, yes, as the would-be censors like to yell - but also church groups, political movements, and everyone with whom you went to middle school. If you're reading this blog, it's probably safe to assume that you've already embraced the community-building wonders of the Internet.

But I am an incurable bibliophile/nerd, so I looked up "sadomasochism" in my school library catalog. The single result I got was Different Loving by Gloria Brame and William Brame, specifically in the library housed in the basement of the on-campus seminary. (To this day I'm not sure why the seminary had a copy of Different Loving and my regular university library did not, but it does give me a greater appreciation for seminaries.) Different Loving reads almost like a catalog itself, with each chapter highlighting a different kink or fetish. With more references to The Eulenspiegel Society in New York City, and the Society of Janus in San Francisco. Reading the names over and over brought mixed feelings: euphoria at their existence, and frustration that all the American kinky people live in New York City or San Francisco.

Spoiler Alert: If you live anywhere in America that anyone with a sense of imagination could call an "urban center," then you probably live near a BDSM or fetish social organization. If you're at least 18 (or sometimes 21) and know where to find them, you would probably be welcomed at their events. I finally learned the trick to from reading The Kinky Girl's Guide to Dating by Luna Grey: Google your hometown and "munch." You can throw in "fetish" or "BDSM" if "munch" is too vague. If you're between the ages of 18 and 35, there may even be a "TNG" ("The Next Generation") group for people your own age. The main difference to the New York City and San Francisco communities is the degree to which they're above ground.

Not all sadomasochists need the organized community in order to indulge their kinks, and not everyone who shows up finds what they're looking for. But the community exists, and it works as a social network as substantial as any "club" or religious group. I'm also grateful for everything I learned from the above books, and highly recommend them along with anything published by Greenery Press or Cleis Press. But making friends with other sadomasochists was, for me, the key to turning my "big dark secret" into a joyful social identity.

Bless the internet.